Frédérique DRILLAUD

My research focuses on:
➢The organizational logic of palliative care around the incommunicable that death represents
➢The accompaniment of the existential dimension as a mediation
➢The communicative forms linked to care practices
This research was initiated as soon as I resumed my studies in the Bachelor of Anthropology and analyzes the way communication in palliative care comes to organize palliative culture.
It was during my training as a palliative care volunteer that I became aware of the global approach applied in palliative care, namely the accompaniment of physical, psychological, social and spiritual suffering. As a volunteer in the field, I didn't understand what accompaniment of so-called spiritual suffering meant, so I decided to delve into this question during my Master's research thesis in anthropology. It was at this point that I first met the sociologist Patrick Baudry, who was the director of my thesis, and Professor Benoît Burucoa (head of the palliative care department at Bordeaux University Hospital for over 20 years, and the man behind the creation of this department), who was the scientific tutor for this thesis within the framework of the CIFRE with SFAP (of which he was a founding member). The thesis concluded that the use of the term "existential suffering" seemed better suited to describing what was emerging in the field. Following this, I was recruited for a year by the Bordeaux University Hospital to carry out exploratory research on the theme of the existential dimension in palliative care units. Talking about dimension rather than suffering means that the existential dimension is not reduced to suffering alone, but is taken into account in a different way. Having had access to the palliative care team members' way of doing things, a culture of care emerged before my very eyes, which inspired me to pursue this research in the form of a thesis. I defended it on March 23, 2023, and its title is "Communication and palliative care - The existential dimension as mediation".