Describing the end-of-life doula role and practices of care: perspectives from four countries
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: End-of-life doulas are emerging as a potentially important new form of community-based caregiving in the global North, yet we know little about this form of care. The aim of our study was to solicit the perspective of key stakeholders and early innovators in community-based end-of-life care about the development and practices of end-of-life doulas. METHODS: We conducted 22 semi-structured interviews with participants in four countries where end-of-life doulas are most active: Australia, Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. FINDINGS: This article focuses on participants' description of the end-of-life doula role and attendant practices, and our findings provide the first detailed taxonomy of the end-of-life doula role and specific services on the basis of the perspective of subject experts in four countries. We situate our findings within literature on the professionalization of caregiving, with particular attention to nomenclature, role flexibility and boundary blurring, and explicit versus tacit knowledge. We also discuss the importance of jurisdictional considerations as the end-of-life doula movement develops. DISCUSSION: We speculate that the end-of-life doula role is potentially experiencing common developmental antecedents similar to other now-professionalized forms of caregiving. Our findings contribute substantial new information to the small body of empirical research about the end-of-life doula role and practices, provide critical firsthand insight as the movement develops, and are the first research to explore end-of-life doulas from a comparative international perspective.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".