ABSTRACT
The study of dying trajectories within hospital organizations happens to have led easily to thinking generally about “structural process” and “status passage.” Structural process relates to the various participants’ awareness. Perhaps the point that most requires underlining, is that structural process has consequences which themselves enter into the emergence of a new structural process. The relationships of these “awareness contexts” to structural processes are neither accidental nor unpredictable, as staff and patients sometimes believe. If the family gathers around during a patient’s last days, then the hospital’s structure is amplified. Even when a dying patient remains on one ward, he can be moved around within that ward so that different aspects of its “structure” can be brought into play. What is true for the staff’s relationships with a patient is also true for its relationships with his family.
