End-of-life doulas offer non-medical supports, guidance, and comfort for people with advancing serious illness, including those close to them. They have been gaining a lot of attention from the public, media, and health care systems as our previous ideas and traditions of care for dying, death, and bereavement continue to shift within the 21st century.… Continue reading
On the End of Life Studies MSc Programme, there is a course entitled Cultural Representations of Death and Dying which examines how dying, death and grief have been represented in popular culture (film, TV, mainstream fiction), visual arts (fine art, photography) and literary genres (creative non- fiction) over the last half century. Students are introduced to… Continue reading
In December we published the overall results from the third ‘world map’ of palliative care development, showing that only a small proportion of the global population, mostly in the global North, live in countries with the most advanced provision of palliative care. We can now present our assessment of global levels of children’s palliative care… Continue reading
It is with huge pleasure this month that we embark upon a truly global initiative within our team – a new programme of online learning in end of life studies. In our research group at the University of Glasgow we feel we belong to a worldwide community of people with a shared interest in questions… Continue reading
In the summer of 2018, Dr Marian Krawczyk and I co-authored an article about how the various western cultural ‘scripts’ which give meaning to dying might be influenced when assisted dying is made lawful and the very end stages of dying becomes, in essence, an ‘optional’ part of the lifecourse. Our thinking was very much… Continue reading
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
We present three events in Dumfries and Galloway to initiate The Mitori Project, a new research collaboration focussed on end of life issues in the UK and Japan. Hirobumi Takenouchi, Haruka Hikasa, Yoshinori Takata, and Miho Tanaka will join us at the University of Glasgow, Dumfries Campus for the first project workshop, and we have also curated… Continue reading
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
