Who is afraid of Ockham's razor? A discourse analysis on resilience in palliative care (2000-2021)

Background: The concept of resilience is becoming increasingly disseminated from material science into various fields of science. It is infiltrating medical fields predominantly via psychology and is also recommended for coping with the special burdens in pain management and palliative care. A precise definition of the term and its operationalization pose problems.Aim: A critical stocktaking of the use of this term in the discourse of palliative care research.Method: Analytical discourse analysis of a text corpus from palliative medical care publications in the time period from 2000 to 2021, obtained by means of a systematic literature search.Results: In the research discourse of palliative care, resilience is a topic primarily as a strategy for self-optimization of employees (e.g., burnout prophylaxis with the aim of preserving the workforce). Only rarely does the question of whether it offers potential for patients and their families take center stage, and then more as a catchword than as a concrete concept. The reason is that there is so far no adequate operationalization of the concept of resilience. Furthermore, there is a lack of sufficient justification for the relevance of the concept in patient care of palliative medicine.Conclusion: There is a lack of qualified contributions of palliative research to the metadiscourse about resilience, especially in the context of affected patients. A successful operationalization of the term requires a highly complex multidimensionality of the palliative path of an interdisciplinary approach. There is a lack of ethical standards that prevent an affirmative instrumentalizing application of the term.

Automated summary

The concept of resilience is being disseminated in various scientific fields, including psychology in the medical domain. However, the lack of a precise definition and operationalization of resilience hinders its application in palliative care research.