Hope at the heart of the care experience: from curative to palliative care

Context. - The notion of hope, before being theorized, is above all lived and shared, in the speeches and practices of health professionals, patients and their relatives. It is also conveyed and transmitted in training: very early on, health students and healthcare professionals are acculturated to a certain conception of hope. We aim to question this notion of hope at the heart of the practices, discourses and experiences of each of these actors. Method. - We will examine these issues and these questions by presenting and discussing the results of a research seminar bringing together health professionals, patients, relatives, support volunteers, researchers in the humanities and social sciences, but also managers of health training. Results and discussion. - Other notions, close to the notion of hope, situated in a horizon of meaning, make it possible to establish links between disciplines. We can cite, for example, the notion of uncertainty, which is often mobilized in the clinic. But this notion, if it is increasingly mobilized by clinicians, does it meet the shared experience of the disease, by patients, their relatives? Therefore, it seems necessary to reflect on the conditions of possibility of a common language. This aim then leads to specifying the point of articulation of early palliative care in a care pathway. Perspective. - At the end of this work, we will try to identify some perspectives, aimed at questioning the conditions of collective learning around the notion of hope: learning to exchange around the experiences of each can have an impact on a decision -making process by example, particularly when it comes to integrating a palliative approach into curative treatment. The conditions for an ethical dialogue around the experience of hope are also to be built from the training systems. (c) 2023 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.