Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

Community Perspectives On The Creation Of A Hospital-Based Doula Program, Laura B. Attanasio, Marisa Decosta, Reva Kleppel, Tiki Govantes, Heather Z. Sankey, Sarah L. Goff

Health Promotion and Policy Faculty Publication Series

Objective: Racial and ethnic inequities in perinatal health outcomes are pervasive. Doula support is an evidence-based practice for improving maternal outcomes. However, women in lower-income populations often do not have access to doulas. This study explored community perspectives on doula care to inform the development of a hospital-based doula program to serve primarily low-income women of color.

Methods: Four focus groups and four individual interviews were conducted with: (1) women who were pregnant or parenting a child under age 2 (n=20); (2) people who had provided support during a birth in the previous 2 years (n=5); …

The Social Process Of Dying In The Hospital: A Grounded Theory Study, Alyson Prokop

Doctoral Dissertations

The majority of deaths in the United States occur in the hospital (Xu, Kochanek, Murphy, & Tejada-Vera, 2010). Because there is little understanding of the meaning behind this delicate social process for the patient, the purpose of this study was to develop a theory that describes the social processes one undergoes during the in-hospital end-of-life phase. Grounded theory methodology was chosen to understand this phenomenon and then explain it theoretically (Charmaz, 1990). The data used to develop the theoretical model was previously collected by StoryCorps and therefore components of secondary analysis were taken into consideration. Stories that are housed at …

Children's Cancer And Transplant Hospital: A Micro Town Within A Bubble, Kimia Samimi

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

As the greatest considerations in health-care design have traditionally been functional —hygiene, efficiency, and flexibility for changing technology— hospitals have evolved to become dehumanizing spaces. In this thesis two specific groups of chronically ill children who have among the longest inpatient stays are studied: cancer and organ transplant patients. Being under immunosuppressive drugs, these children are physically vulnerable thus are kept completely isolated. These long stays and isolation can be very depressing for them.

This thesis undertakes the challenge of designing a fully isolated space that doesn’t feel like one or in other words “a micro-town within a bubble”. The …