New quality measures are urgently needed for end-of-life and palliative care, to assess the care given to all patients in all settings, say researchers at the University of Cambridge’s Primary Care Unit. That’s because in the UK and elsewhere, end-of life care is provided in many different settings and by a wide range of health and social care professionals: in hospitals, hospices, care homes and…

Palliative care started millennia back in various forms as human beings had a natural instinct to care. It was initially taken up by religious orders and people from parishes looked after ill, destitute and dying patients. In last century, with advent of the hospice movement, hospices mushroomed around the developed world. They had a model of multidisciplinary team which was backed up by…

Heather Richardson, CEO and Marie Cooper, Project Lead for Celebrating Palliative Care Nursing at St Christophers, share their experience of meeting Elly Bonham Carter who is living with advancing lung cancer and coming to the end of her life. Elly candidly shares with them her experiences of death, dying and loss. As well as facing her own mortality, she cared for her disabled husband for over…

New research from Dr Arjun Kingdon at the University of Cambridge’s Primary Care Unit throws light on why assisted hydration for patients near the end of life is difficult for doctors to discuss with patients and families. Assisted hydration at the end of life is a highly emotive topic. Some may remember negative headlines about the Liverpool Care Pathway (LCP), many of which focused on poor…

The next in the EAPC series on the impact of the war in Ukraine is a post from Andreas Stähli, Head of the Academy at Johannes Hospice in Münster, Germany, about a bond of trust between two hospices. Posted on April 13, 2022 by pallcare  – reprinted with permission. As I write this, we are in the midst of planning the next relief transport to the hospice in Ivano-Frankivsk in Western Ukraine. We…

As we prepare for the launch, on April 30th, of the Oxford Textbook of Public Health Palliative Care, Dr Julian Abel shares some thoughts about the blind spots of traditional models and the importance of adopting a public health approach. Further information about the launch is to be found at the bottom of the article. Over the last 60 years Palliative care has done an enormous amount to relieve…

Pilgrimage is an ancient practice and a feature of most of the major religions we have today. Often thought to be of benefit to spirituality, what about the benefits to psychological, emotional and also physical wellbeing? Some studies have sought to explore this in more detail, but few have looked at the impact of pilgrimage on quality of life (QOL) and wellbeing. Our study ‘The Lourdes…