By Dr. Joseph Hawkins, Consultant in Palliative Medicine, Ashford and St Peter’s Clinical End of Life Lead, Ashford and St Peter’s NHS Foundation Trust. Twitter: @JoeHawk75825077 ‘I’m making them palliative, please can you come and see them’. I prefer to think of myself as the firefighter and not the arsonist- that is to say as […]
Latest articles
“Palliative care has some major blind spots”
Mark Taubert (MT) speaks to Julian Abel (JA) ahead of the launch of the Oxford Textbook of Public Health Palliative Care MT: Hi Julian, what’s going on?JA: I’m good and it was nice to meet you in person at the recent Palliative Care Congress in Telford.MT: I beat you 10:7 in the table football, wasn’t […]
All’s wool that ends wool
Dr Matthew Doré is the Chair of the Palliative Care Congress 22/23 for the Association of Palliative Medicine for Great Britain and Ireland, which by shear good fortune, this year ran concurrently with the UK Alpaca Conference! He is also a Consultant in Palliative Medicine in Northern Ireland, enjoys his new warm alpaca socks and […]
Seeking Excellence in End-of-life Care (SEECare)
Dr Yinting Ta, Palliative Medicine Registrar at St Joseph’s Hospice, London and APM Research & Ethics Committee Trainee Representative With palliative care becoming a legal right, now is the time to come together and arm ourselves with the evidence to ensure that every person has access to high quality end-of-life care in hospital. “Dying is […]
The Digital Death Survey 2022
www.DigitalLegacyAssociation.org The internet and communication technologies have changed many things. It has changed the ways in which we interact with one another, the ways in which we work and it is now having an increasing influence and importance in the ways in which we plan for death and remember our loved ones. COVID-19 and social […]
Inequality and the Cost of Dying
By Megan Doheny, Post Doctorate at the Department of Global Public Health, Aging Research Center, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm University, Sweden, Stockholm. E-mail: megan.doheny@ki.se.Twitter: @megandoheny6gm1 Thesis: Socio-economic differences in the healthcare utilisation of older persons in Sweden “Even if I’m dying, until I actually die, I am still living” –Paul Kalanithi The above quote is […]
Why being clever isn’t always very clever.
By Dr. Joseph Hawkins, Consultant in Palliative Medicine, Ashford and St Peter’s Clinical End of Life Lead, Ashford and St Peter’s NHS Foundation Trust. Twitter: @JoeHawk75825077 Cleverness is a very human attribute. When we talk about animals being clever we don’t really mean that they are smart we mean that they are showing an ability […]
Microplastics; are they the next largest chronic health concern?
By Dr Matthew Doré, palliative care consultant at Northern Ireland Hospice & Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast. What is the new smoking? History teaches us there is likely something which we are doing right now, that one day we will look back at in abject horror. There is likely something which we have some current […]
Development of cancer- related fatigue services in BCUHB, North Wales 2020- 2021
By Jackie Pottle, Macmillan Cancer AHP Lead BCUHB and Lisa Heaton Brown, Consultant Clinical Psychologist, Cancer, Haematology & Palliative care. “I think, for me, the overall impact of the workshop (Video group clinic) was that the recognition by experts in the field that fatigue is ‘real’ and has impacts on life was important as was the […]
How To Tell if Your Patient is Dying.
By Dr. Joseph Hawkins, Palliative Medicine Consultant, ASPH NHS Foundation Trust and Woking and Sam Beare Hospice. Twitter: @JoeHawk75825077 Collaborators include Sophie Dargan, Palliative Care MDT Coordinator, and Susan Dargan, Clinical Nurse. ‘It’s a travesty!’, a colleague said to me- ‘look at these scans’. I looked and agreed; those lungs resembled a Jackson Pollock painting […]