Defining Death Literacy

Death literacy is defined as a set of knowledge and skills that make it possible to gain access to, understand and act upon end of life and death care options. People, and communities, with high levels of death literacy have context specific knowledge about the death system and the ability to put that knowledge into practice. Positioned within the public health framework, death literacy is considered an outcome of peoples’ experiences of, and learnings about, death and dying. Death literacy also appears to be a resource that individuals and communities can use for their own benefit strengthening their capacity for future caring. This purpose of this paper is to provide an exploration of the concept of death literacy using the evidence from a six-year research project. We do this by examining how it corresponds to, and differs from, existing concepts and practices such as death education, health literacy and community development. Our aim is to introduce new thinking into the public health approach to palliative care, and offer practice development pathways in this arena and propose that death literacy offers a useful conceptual framework for both describing and understanding the outcomes of a public health approach to palliative care.