Avoiding complacency in palliative care

I have been reading sections of Ciceley Saunder’s Selected Writings 1958–2004 (Saunders, 2006). It is a remarkable collection about her life and her belief in the inherent worth of helping and supporting those facing death. Its main focus, naturally, is on the emerging role of the hospice approach to palliative care and the need for individual suffering to be at the heart of interactions with patients and families. Saunder’s returns again and again to an encounter with one patient dying from cancer in 1948 that seemed to be the catalyst for her life’s work. She emphasises the need to provide the physical and emotional space to allow people to come to terms with the inevitability of their death.