Home as Therapeutic Landscape: Family Caregivers Providing Palliative Care at Home

This chapter focuses on the concept of therapeutic landscapes to examine how providing palliative and end-of-life care in the home affects caregivers' experience and meaning of home. In Canada, these services are fragmented, with each province providing various degrees of public and private services, creating gaps in the necessary support structures for family caregivers to sustain care in the home. Therapeutic landscapes have traditionally referred to places with enduring reputations for healing, but can also include places associated with health promotion and maintenance. Developments have moved the concept beyond specific idealized sites reputed for health and healing, visited only temporarily by those who are able; therapeutic landscapes now encompass commonplace, ordinary geographies – such as the home. The home was the preferred site for care and the decision for care in the home was mutually decided upon by both the patient and family caregiver.