One of the greatest challenges facing the NHS, in this its 70th anniversary year, is the care of ageing and increasingly frail older people. End of life care is not something that we as doctors seem to want to talk about, which means that when patients are admitted as an emergency to hospital the default… Continue reading
This is a chance to enjoy recordings of three leading academics presenting their research into end of life in hospitals in Scotland, Denmark and New Zealand and hear them comparing the differences between the three countries in a lively public discussion. We’d love you to join in the discussion, so please leave your comments or… Continue reading
Marie Curie Scotland and the University of Glasgow co-hosted a seminar End of life care in Scottish hospitals: opportunities for wider engagement. Full coverage of the event is now available. The seminar provided a platform for discussion about end of life care in Scotland, focusing on the healthcare and policy implications of research into the imminence… Continue reading
It is a rare experience in an academic career to carry out a project with a simple research question, to publish the findings and then to find there is unprecedented interest from many quarters. That was how things worked out with our study of the imminence of death among a national cohort of hospital inpatients,… 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
Labouring in the fields of academia can so often result in a product that is consumed only by a few like minded folk. So it can be quite a surprise when our efforts resonate widely with a larger community of interest. On 17 March we published our paper on Imminence of death in hospital patients … Continue reading
Some time ago a colleague of mine in Ireland, Eugene Murray, then CEO of the Irish Hospice Foundation, raised the idea of whether it was possible to work out what proportion of people in hospital at any one time are in the last year of life. Knowing the figure, he argued, would assist in advocacy… Continue reading
