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Palliative Care

Promises, promises

It is widely accepted that the modern hospice movement was founded 50 years ago with St Christopher's Hospice in 1967. Like any another quinquagenarian may attest, any and/or many years of preceding...

Sexual bereavement: a forgotten concept

The death of a partner can lead to sexual loss, grief and bereavement. Adults aged over 65 years make up between 34–48% of widowed adults across the globe (Radosh and Simkin, 2016); these individuals...

Disadvantaged dying in palliative care

It remains true that strongly held religious and cultural beliefs can prevent people from Black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds from accessing palliative care. However, it also remains true...

Preparing healthcare students for palliative care is essential

The World Health Organization (WHO) is clear about what constitutes palliative care and its goals: ‘Palliative care is a crucial part of integrated, people-centred health services. Relieving serious...

The changing nature of dying: lessons from the pandemic

The pandemic has pushed death rituals to resemble what happened with industrialisation where death was, in most families, removed from the home set up to institutions where strangers cared for the...

Language matters in death and dying

It has become customary now that each year the Dying Matters campaign by Hospice UK dedicate a Dying Matters awareness week in May encouraging people across the globe to talk about death and dying....

A 100 years of pathologising normalcy of grief

‘Although mourning involves grave departures from the normal attitude towards life, it never occurs to us to regard it as a pathological condition and to refer it to a medical treatment. We rely on it...

The realities of work/life balance in palliative care

The notion of work/life balance creates an important problem in itself because of the assumption inherent in it, that a clear and neatly divisible split between work and life exists or is possible to...

Spare a thought for the lonely: the role of palliative care

While it is clear from the literature that policies and interventions focus on patients and older people who are alone, there is a paucity of strategies to ‘tackle’ loneliness. The obvious...

Reflecting on the ‘Palliative care’ column

This is my 200th palliative care column for the Mark Allen Group of journals, with the bulk of them written for the British Journal of Community Nursing. In this article, I want to reflect on the...

Achieving a dignified death in palliative nursing

The concept of a dignified death can also be viewed in relative terms. This could mean taking into account the context in which the death occurs. We cannot afford to use the same factors to achieve a...

When death is part of us: challenges for community nursing

The literature is full of strategies to support families and close friends during and after death. For example, one modern approach is the Dual Process Model for coping with bereavement developed by...

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