Our aims

To describe and examine the multiple occasions and forms when palliative care staff actively do not do something, conceptualising such ‘non-interventions’ as productive and meaningful social and material practices;

To examine if and when ‘non-interventions’ clash with the more dominant biomedical imperative to always intervene, and how individuals, teams, and systems deal with this;

To describe how a sample of patients, and their relatives and carers, make sense of these practices;

To contribute to a growing body of social science research of health concerned with social practice by developing theoretical and methodological approaches that are able to take acts of not doing ‘seriously’;

To invite a range of stakeholders, during innovative workshop sessions, to reflect upon the ethnographic findings and help generate insights into how ‘non-interventions’ are perceived outside the immediate clinical setting or personal experience);

To develop a range of outputs and resources (some of which will be hosted on this website) for others to use