![]() Have proper conversations, and make proper plans.” Palliative care entails not just controlling symptoms, but looking after patients and their familiesĪll this, he recognises, will require “a shift of resources, into the community” – and funding. So we have to identify what’s important to people, and make sure it happens. Everything else about our death, though, is uncertain. It can’t become a box-ticking exercise.”ĭying, death and bereavement need to be seen not as purely medical events, Chapman says: “It’s a truism, obviously, but the one certainty in life is that we’ll die. It’s about recognising that every patient and situation is different that communication is crucial that both the patient and their family have to be involved. “The quality of individual care has to be right, every time, because we only have one chance. “It’s not just about the place, though that’s important and things are moving,” says Chapman: the number of people dying in hospital has now dropped below 50%. The reports all, in fact, conclude pretty much the same thing: the need for end-of-life care that is coordinated among all the services, focused on the dying person’s needs and wishes, and delivered by competent, specially trained staff in (where possible) the place chosen by the patient – which for most people is, generally, home. From the government’s End of Life Care Strategy of 2008 through Julia Neuberger’s 2013 review of the widely criticised Liverpool Care Pathway to One Chance to Get it Right, published in 2014, and last year’s What’s Important to Me – the picture is, gradually, beginning to change. ![]() There has been no shortage of reports on the question. “Death became medicalised a whole lot of taboos grew up around it,” Chapman says. A big majority, 60%, died in hospital 20% in care homes, like my father 6% in hospices, like my mother. By the early years of this century, fewer than 20% did. ![]()
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