Author: Dr Tony Duffy, Consultant Palliative Medicine, Edinburgh, Scotland Introduction: In the context of the current UK assisted dying debate, the terms ‘faecal’ and ‘faeculent’ vomiting have been publicly employed, including during the Second Reading debate in parliament. This terminology has featured in stories of unpleasant deaths to contextualise why some people feel assisted suicide […]
Category: Comment
The Victorian assisted suicide experience and its implications
Author: Hon. Robert Clark, former Attorney-General and MP, Victoria, Australia. Introduction The experience of Victoria, Australia, has been cited in the United Kingdom debate as a shining example of how an assisted suicide regime can work well. I demonstrate here that this is not so, and set out some implications of the Victorian experience. The […]
Could QR-Based Information Sharing Platforms Be Acceptable to Specialist Nurses for Palliative Care Patients?
Authors: Dr. Caitlin Cahill – Junior Clinical Fellow in Palliative Care, Velindre University NHS Trust, United Kingdom Dr. Stephanie Sivell – Research Fellow, Marie Curie Research Centre, Division of Population Medicine, Cardiff University, UK Prof. Nikki Pease – Professor of Palliative Medicine, Velindre University NHS Trust and Cardiff University, UK Introduction: The Care Quality Commission […]
Could assisted dying for ‘terminal anorexia’ be coming to the NHS?
Author: Chelsea Roff Chelsea is Executive Director of Eat Breathe Thrive, a non-profit organisation that works to help people recover from eating disorders. Connect on X and LinkedIn. For an audio version of this post, please click here Introduction: When I first learned about a physician in Colorado helping patients with eating disorders die by […]
Discrimination-driven deaths – Analysing Ontario Coroner Reports on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide
Author: Dr. Ramona Coelho, Family Physician; Senior Fellow of Domestic and Health Policy at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute; Member of Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) Death Review Committee; Ontario, Canada. New – Listen to this post on Spotify, read by the author: Introduction: As a family physician in Ontario, Canada, my practice largely serves marginalised groups: […]
What Matters Most: Cause, Preferred and Actual Location of Death for MND Patients in South Wales
Authors: Jasmine Reeve-Foster Jasmine is a final year undergraduate medical student currently intercalating in Psychology and Medicine iBSc at Cardiff University Dr. Siwan Seaman is Medical Director, Marie Curie Cymru and Consultant in Palliative Medicine Motor Neuron Disease (MND) is a life-limiting illness affecting 1 in 300 people in the UK. It is characterised […]
SEECare & a Sea Change?- How NHS Hospitals care for you when you’re dying
Author: Dr Simon Tavabie, Transforming End of Life Care Fellow @UCLH & Palliative Care Doctor (on behalf of the authors of the SEECareUK study) Dr Tavabie summarises the findings from the recently published Seeking Excellence in End-of-Life Care UK (SEECareUK) study It’s a Saturday morning at your local District General Hospital and sadly, […]
Ninety-nine Balloons
Predictive powers are a sought after quality in palliative care – so how did Nena get it so right in 1983? by Prof. Mark Taubert, Consultant in Palliative Medicine, Cardiff, UK For many Germans like me, who grew up in the Eighties, there’s been a sense of déjà vu. The international furore around suspicious […]
The Sound of covid-19: Binaural Recordings of a Palliative Care Ward Round in a Cancer Hospital.
Authors: Prof. Mark Taubert, Consultant in Palliative Medicine, Velindre University NHS Trust & Cardiff University School of Medicine, Cardiff, UK Mr Glenn Davidson, Artstation, Cardiff, UK Dr. Mike Fedeski, Artstation, Cardiff, UK Dr. Jelle van Gurp, Coordinator Clinical Ethics Radboud University Medical Centre; Assistant professor Ethics of Healthcare, Nijmegen, Netherlands The pandemic has created an […]
Slipping Through the NET
A blog by patient Sally Jenkins, Cardiff, UK Palliative versus end of life care, we all know they’re not the same, but even so, they’re often used synonymously. Nowhere is the need to distinguish between them more pressing than in the management of neuroendocrine cancers, known as NeuroEndocrine Tumours, or ‘NETs’. Arising from unusual neuroendocrine […]