by Dr Ollie Minton, Consultant in Palliative Medicine, Brighton, UK I couldn’t get to Bournemouth for this year’s Association for Palliative Medicine conference so went for complete palliation (soins palliatifs, dude) in Switzerland, instead. The conference side-programme did not, on this occasion, involve a day visit to the Dignitas clinic, which I did point out […]
Category: Social Media
Serious Illness Conversations Cymru
by Dr Nikki Pease, Consultant in Palliative Medicine, Velindre NHS Trust, Cardiff, Wales (Cymru) December 2016 saw the launch of the Serious Illness Conversation Cymru project. It is an all Wales project supported with funding from Welsh Government’s End of Life Care Board. The project, which held its pilot teaching event in December 2016 (picture […]
Songs in the key of Life
by Dr Oliver Minton @drol007 and Dr Mark Taubert @DrMarkTaubert Artistic imagery to depict palliative care was the focus of a recent mysterious blog on the BMJ SPCare blog site, and generated much discussion on social media. The theme of this week’s blog is music. A recent music and memory series on BBC Radio 3 reminded […]
Public Image Limited
Need New Images In Palliative Care? Tired of Trees, Autumn Leaves and Hands? Feel free to use these. No Copyright, no charge. The Palliative Skateboard. Brought to you by a few people, including: https://www.instagram.com/pmillustration/ & @Image_wurkz & @DrMarkTaubert […]
That was the week that was – The @NHS account takeover!
by Dr Ollie Minton Consultant in Palliative Medicine, London, UK Yes, yes, I know I live in an echo chamber/social media bubble and the internet is full of fake news,but unless I imagined the whole experience I was given control of the @NHS twitter account (https://twitter.com/nhs?lang=en) for the week of the 28th August. The […]
Pejorative Words or ‘The bed blocker with acopia in bed 14 that passed away, having lost her fight’
By Dr Ollie Minton (Consultant in Palliative Medicine, somewhere in London town), Dr Erica Borgstrom (Medical Anthropologist, Open University), Dr Mark Taubert (Consultant in Palliative Medicine, somewhere in Wales) When The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was first published, readers were not much disturbed by Mark Twain’s use of the n-word, let […]
Men and Grief – Beware of typecasting
by Dr Mark Taubert @DrMarkTaubert Clinical Director for Palliative Medicine, Velindre NHS Trust, Cardiff There are three good reasons for writing this little essay about the spectre of grief: 1) It is contemporary and topical – for instance, we are in the midst of Dying Matters Awareness week. 2) I have recently spoken to a […]
Palliative care in space – breaking bad news to a satellite
by Dr Mark Taubert, Consultant in Palliative Medicine at Velindre NHS Trust, Cardiff, Wales @DrMarkTaubert What do you do when a piece of debris in space sends out an end of life distress message via Twitter? This particular message read as follows: “Your people predict I will burn up in Earth’s atmosphere early 2017. […]
Palliative or supportive? A rose by any other name
by Dr Ollie Minton, Macmillan consultant and honorary senior lecturer in palliative medicine. I do not assume everyone has an intricate knowledge of Shakespeare but most will be familiar with the balcony scene in Romeo & Juliet. The inference is that the name of something does not affect how it functions. I won’t extrapolate that […]
It’s good to talk and even better to communicate effectively
by Dr Ollie Minton, Macmillan consultant and honorary senior lecturer in palliative medicine I remember the old British Telecom adverts moving from Maureen Lipman’s “ooh he’s got an ology” to the final incarnation of Bob Hoskins “It’s good to talk”. I’m fairly certain after this, the internet took off and the simple phone call was […]