Introduction

As part of Part Five, this chapter explores issues of professional and interprofessional ethics across national boundaries (see Figure 1.1). The authors approach ethics and volunteering in palliative care from a number of ethical theoretical perspectives, but principally from a medical and personal ethics standpoint. This chapter uses the case studies of two countries to highlight ethical issues arising from volunteer involvement in two very different settings for palliative care: Kerala in India and the UK.

In a palliative care setting volunteers find themselves as part of a multidisciplinary team. In Chapter One, Hannah and Jindal-Snape discuss the challenges of interprofessional collaboration (IPC) between different professional groups. They also discuss the theories of consequentialism, largely focused on the outcomes of an individual's actions, and deontology, which is more concerned with the ‘rightness’ or ‘wrongness’ of actions (Healy, 2007). When considering the involvement of volunteers as part of the palliative care multi-professional team, the authors were also influenced by these theories. Organisations are most likely to be concerned with implications arising from the outcome of a volunteer's actions while the professional staff team is likely to be most concerned both with the motivations behind these actions and whether they were correct and appropriate.

The World Health Organisation (1998) defines palliative care as:

The authors will explore two very different volunteering models: a community model in Kerala, South India and the UK hospice model. There are different issues affecting palliative care in the developing world and hospices in the UK. In countries such as India, the main challenges in the provision of palliative care are the size of population requiring care, scarcity of resources, poverty affecting patients and families and distances to treatment centres. Volunteers and the community play a key role in supporting patients and providing aspects of care. UK hospices, in comparison, are well resourced and staffed; the population, relatively speaking, is better off.