ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates the uniqueness of working in the field of palliative and end-of-life care and the importance of understanding the influence of culture and ethnicity in the helping process. It explores the potential for countertransference issues, which inevitably accompany the professional's efforts. Working in palliative and end-of-life care can be challenging to any helping professional. Palliative care is often about pain and about suffering, mortality, and death. It takes a certain passion, tolerance, and ability to sit with emotional, spiritual, and physical pain to do this work. Mostly, the literature provides strong messages of encouraging practitioners to consider culture as an important part of their work and to develop sensitive interventions or strategies for working across diverse cultures. The possibilities of countertransference are rich and complex, especially given the intersection of serious illness, dying, culture, and ethnicity. The enormity of the tasks, spiritual nature of the work in palliative and end-of-life care, is both challenging and rewarding.
