‘Living choice’: the commitment to tissue donation in palliative care

Professionals working in palliative care pride themselves on respecting patients’ views and wishes. Palliative care patients are often aware that they are going to die and so the issue of what is going to happen to them after death becomes more relevant. That they should be involved in decisions about tissue donation seems obvious, yet many palliative care units do not routinely discuss donation with patients and their families. A grounded theory approach was used to develop an explanation of the low commitment to tissue donation by palliative care units. Six registered nurses and two doctors from each of two separate palliative care units participated in semi-structured, audiotaped interviews. Several themes emerged from the interviews to form a theory of why there is a low commitment to tissue donation in palliative care units. We have called the theory ‘living choice’. The dominant theme or category was ‘patient choice’ and this pervaded and influenced ‘professional role’, ‘donation process’, ‘concerns’ and ‘knowledge’. All these categories were contained and continuously interacted in the palliative care environment.