“Too old and/or multi-morbid.” Ending as a problematization of time in maintenance dialysis

Résumé
In the provision of maintenance dialysis to patients whose kidneys have stopped functioning, improving patients’ quality of life is a central concern of clinicians. But what is it that nephrologists actually do to improve patients’ quality of life? Drawing on an approach to values as enacted in practice (Dussauge, Helgesson, Lee 2015) and ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Austria, the presentation reports of two quality of life-projects that clinicians launched. I will tease out that while both projects problematized the widespread provision of maintenance dialysis in the hospital to elderly patients, they enacted in diverging ways the relation between quantity and quality of life. Time, I will argue, becomes struggled with in maintenance practices not only in terms of prolongation of use, permanence of the object, slowing down of decay or stubbornness of a thing (Denis & Pontille 2022), but also as a quest for and crafting of an ending.

Lien zoom : https://unil.zoom.us/j/94277291515