The Roots of Palliative Care: Michael Kearney, Sue Britton, and Justin Sanders

As far as we’ve come in the 50 years since Balfour Mount and Sue Britton opened the first palliative care at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Quebec, have we lost something along the way?

In today’s podcast we welcome some of the early pioneers in palliative care to talk about the roots of palliative care.  Sue Britton was the first nurse hired on that palliative care unit. Michael Kearney on a transformational meeting in Cicely Saunders’s office, with Balfour Mount at her side and a glass of sherry.  Justin Sanders wants to be sure the newer generations of palliative care clinicians understand the early principles and problems that animated the founders of hospice and palliative care, including:

• Origins of the word “palliative” - it’s not what I thought! Yes, it means “to cloak,” but there’s more…

• Whole-person-care

• Total pain

• Healing as a process distinct from the deterioration of the body

• Sympomatologists

• The patient and family as the unit of care 

Our guests referenced many articles on this podcast, linked above and below.  If you read just one, read Palliative Medicine - Just Another Specialty? by Kearney. I promise it’s short. 2 pages.  Here’s a taste: 

…While there is an abusive and useless dimension to illness, pain and suffering which needs to be removed if at all possible, there is also potential in such experience…If we in palliative medicine fail to accept this view, a view which allows that there may also be a potential in the suffering of the dying process, if we sell out completely to the literalism of the medical model with its view that such suffering is only a problem, we will be in danger of following a pattern which could significantly limit our scope for development and lead to our becoming ’symptomatologists’, within just another specialty. 

And love that Jim Croce choice.  What’s in a name? I’ve got a name.

 Enjoy!

 -Alex Smith

 

Links

• Link to the McGill National Grand Rounds Series on Palliative Care, Michael Kearney as initial presenter, and registration for future events. No, you don’t need to be Canadian. Canadians are welcoming.
• Palliative Medicine - Just Another Specialty? In Palliative Medicine By Kearney
• Joe Wood’s book on Total Pain 
• Balfour Mount’s memoir Ten Thousand Crossroads paper on Healing Connections in JPSM and Healing and Palliative Care in Palliative Medicine
• Cicely Saunders: A Life and Legacy, by David Clark
• Self-Care of Physicians Caring for Patients at the End of Life, by Michael Kearney and colleagues in JAMA Perspectives on Care at the Close of Life series
• Twycross on Readdressing Balance in Hospice