User participation in decision making processes regarding medical treatment for cancer patients in a palliative stage.

This ethnographic study will describe and analyse the complexity of decision making processes regarding medical treatment for cancer patients in a palliative stage. This will entail deliberations about initiating, withdrawing or withholding life extending measures like chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery. The study will focus on the organisation and effectuation of decision making processes pertaining to such treatment, and the understanding on which these decisions are based. How patients and their rela tives take part in these processes, or what possibilities they have for influencing them, is a central research question. The project will attend to several sources and points of view: the patients themselves, their family caretakers and next-of-kin, and doctors and nurses who are responsible for them at different junctures of their patient pathways.