Can you imagine fifty medical students and fifty palliative care practitioners giving up what might be the last warm, sunny Saturday of the year to attend a symposium about someone who was born ninety seven years ago? The attendees’ attraction and motivation would have to be high. And so they were on 17 October at… Continue reading
I genuinely didn’t know anything about Dr Feelgood. The film title ‘The Ecstasy of Wilko Johnson’ was also a mystery to me. The online blurb about the film was similarly obscure, describing how director Julien Temple had produced an ‘overflowing visual cocktail’ serving up ‘Bunuel, Tarkovsky, Cocteau and Marcel Powell as fellow travellers on his… Continue reading
The night is black all around. The ‘supermoon’ is rising over the loch behind us. The damp air is on our backs. But our faces are warmed by the fire. The talk, drifting over the flames, is about mortality. This is the EAFS ‘off grid’ environmental festival, where artists, writers, makers and dreamers of dreams… Continue reading
The public has responded to a call for views on the state of palliative care in Scotland, and with the publication of these submissions the Scottish Parliament Inquiry into Palliative Care is making rapid progress. I am struck by two things: the great variety of these responses, but also the rather low volume. Perhaps that tells… Continue reading
Dame Cicely Saunders died at St Christopher’s Hospice on 14 July 2005, at the age of 87. This is an interview I recorded with her just a few months earlier. I first met Dame Cicely in 1995 and over the next decade we worked together on various projects. She was a keen supporter of my work… Continue reading
These are important times for palliative and end of life care in Scotland, and with an ongoing parliamentary inquiry into palliative care we are all eager to see what the outcomes will be. But first we must all play our part. I am already involved as the Consulting Editor in the production of the Scottish… Continue reading
In this short video presentation I discuss what we know about ways to identify people who are in the last year of their life or who might have palliative care needs. I start by setting out the global context, showing how many people in the world currently die every year, and explaining why this is… Continue reading
There is lots of interest in deaths cafés right now. As part of our research project Global Interventions at the End of Life we are examining death cafés as a ‘cultural intervention’ – how they have come about, who organises and attends them, what part they may play in wider discourses about death and dying… Continue reading
