Hospice as a New Actor in the Caregiving Organizational Field: Socio-Cultural and Economic Obstacles for Legitimation in Russia

In lots of European countries the use of palliative medicine in a form of hospices as new care providers and social actors is a well known and accepted practice which dictates how people treat humans with untreatable medical conditions.All these practices of palliative medicine and the functions of hospices are regulated by Russian laws while in reality these new "death" institutions that change people's perception of death itself and also how the person is ought to be treated while he's dying, remain not widespread and of a low quality. So in order to research socio-cultural opinions of Russian people on palliative medicine and these new mechanisms of taking care for people with incurable illnesses, we first need to understand what kind of economical or socio-cultural barriers are there in our country that are making legitimation of hospices harder.It is stated that there's an immediate connection between those barriers and the process of legitimation which is the acceptance of a new institutional order that's trying to provide people with incurable illnesses with a higher quality of life through hospice services. By following the qualitative research approach 15 in depth interviews were conducted which were divided into 4 different groups of interviewees based on their expert knowledge in this specific field of study and based on their personal experience of incurable condition in their family. Based on the gathered data we can say that barriers for legitimation of hospices in Russia are: people with incurable diseases not being able to properly socialize, people with same conditions not accepting professional care and treating it as an invasion of their privacy; the care itself which becomes an obligation and demands a lot of emotional strength,and the last but not least the topic of death considered sacred and a thing that people try to ignore.