Hospital Palliative Care at the End of Life
“Death is terrifying”, writes the author Susan Cheever, “…because it is so ordinary. It happens all the time”. Continue reading
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Reflections on The Mitori Project so far
Back in March 2019, a group of researchers from the UK and Japan gathered in Dumfries to launch the Mitori Project. The ESRC funded project aims to examine end of life care issues in the UK and Japan in three workstreams: ‘Culture’, ‘Practice’ and ‘Policy’. Time flies! Six months have passed since the first workshop.… Continue reading
New ESRC-Funded Project “Dying in the Margins” Investigates How Socio-Economic Deprivation Effects End of Life Experiences and Ability to Die at Home
We are all aware of the headlines about the impact of government austerity measures on communities up and down the UK. But what impact has austerity had on people’s experiences of dying and, specifically, their ability to die in their own home? What is it like to be facing death in materially constrained circumstances in… Continue reading
A new approach to suffering in life-limiting illness: Total pain, the brain-gut axis, and the human microbiome
People with life-limiting illnesses report exceptionally high rates of psychosocial and existential suffering in conjunction with bodily pain. Cicely Saunders famously conceptualized this cumulative distress as ‘total pain’. As you may already know, we’re pretty interested in total pain around here. Professor David Clark has written extensively about it (see here for an overview), and… Continue reading
End of life issues in Japan and the UK: the Mitori Project blossoms
When our Japanese colleagues arrived in Scotland in early spring for the launch of a new collaborative research project, I was delighted to see the interest they took in the cherry blossom that was starting to appear around our Dumfries campus. As our week together unfolded, the beauty of the trees appeared to match the… Continue reading
My PhD Journey
By Stephen Greenhalgh For the last 13 years I have been working as the Chief Executive of St Catherine’s Hospice in Lancashire. Having had a varied career prior to that in the Army, Church of England, RAF, NHS and Local Government the hospice role came as an unexpected turn in the road and yet, from… Continue reading
Palliative care in Southern Brazil: Cicely Saunders, legacy, and lighthouse
I started to study palliative care in 2008, motivated by personal reasons. Today there are social media, TV programmes, podcasts, and many other ways to spread the message about the need for palliative care. In 2008 that wasn’t the reality at all. I think the first time I had contact with the Dame Cicely Saunders’… Continue reading
My encounter with community based palliative care in Kerala
Recently, I had the privilege of going to India as part of our project “Creating a framework for assessing community based palliative care in Kerala” There, I was able to attend the Indian Association of Palliative Care’s annual conference and spend a week working alongside Dr. Devi Vijay from the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta,… Continue reading