Avoiding the humanistic aspect of death: an outcome from the implicit elements of health professions education

There is a basic incompatibility between contemporary death education and the fundamental education of health care professionals. Programs on death and dying explicitly require learners to focus on the affectual and experiential aspects of their patients and of themselves; yet there are implicit elements of health professions education that keep the attention of the student and clinician centered on technological factors. As a result, reactions to death become inadvertently linked to the models and actions prescribed for health care. Thus, humanistic aspects of death and dying are avoided because of the need to fulfill the technological expectations of the profession. These covert influences arise from the use of the medical model, the language of the health professional, and the expectations of the medicalized patient.