Death and Taxes – The Certainty of Life

Yet in the medical and pharmaceutical world, this continual pounding was offset by my personal encounters with some outstanding people – whose deaths, or the work they did with the dying, taught me about how much more we can do to facilitate a better end of life for patients. After all, even when drugs cease to be useful, physical and emotional needs still persist.It ’s about the little thingsAn English geriatrician and campaigner for better patient care,Kate Granger, founded the‘Hello my name is…’ campaign in the UK. Designed to encourage doctors to introduce themselves to patients as a priority – rather than wading into HCP-only exchange of facts and figures – it was as Kate herself described when she herself transitioned from doctor to cancer patient: to avoid patients feeling “like a shapeless pleb on a bed.”Here ’s one merit then of social media for patient storytelling and giving a patient a voice; I never met Kate in person, yet I had a close relationship with her - and I miss her daily tweets. After being part of my life for several years, she died on July 23rd. Kate put a digitally-enhanced face on the pain of dying. Her candid communications about the things that matter at the end of life showed that we can better manage ‘A Good Death’. And her final tweets chronicle how dreadful and difficult it was for her HCPs to get her pain under control:“I just wake up every day wishing this wasn’t happening, and then the pain and nausea kick in, an...
Source: EyeForPharma - Category: Pharmaceuticals Authors: Source Type: news