On comfort in palliative care

Comfort is a central aspect of palliative care, encompassing the management of pain and symptoms, as well as how people feel and experience care. Comfort has been argued to be especially tenuous or transient in palliative care, as a constantly shifting set of bodily sensations and relations are anticipated and cared for. In this article, drawing on in-depth interviews and photo elicitation, we explore the accounts of patients, family carers, staff and volunteers from a palliative care service in Australia, to understand how care is configured and facilitated through everyday gestures of comfort. We unpack how comfort (and comforting) is understood, sought, and done, to reveal how it is experienced as a set of social, relational, processual, and dynamic relations between bodies and environments. Our findings reveal how comfort for those nearing the end of life and those who care for them is brought about variously in the familiarity and reliability of things and surroundings, as well as through gestures of intimacy, recognition, and flexibility. We find that while predominantly considered as intentional and momentary, comfort has lasting effects. These lingering affective resonances, we argue, are key to recognising the diversity of what matters to people in palliative care.