Care - Corpus - Page 5

Hospice: a philosophy of care

28 August 2017 5 Comments

Doug Lilly

Three years ago my partner asked me to deliver a gift to Carolyn, a friend of hers who was a patient at the Otago Community Hospice. Although I lived only a couple of streets away, I had never entered the building or given it much thought. I assumed it was a very sad place full of people dying of cancer.

Little did I know that within a few months I would be working at the Hospice as Operations Manager. My superficial and narrow understanding of what they did was quickly corrected as I discovered what a wonderful service it is, and how special is the team of staff and volunteers who work there and provide specialist palliative care.

Palliative care is an approach that improves the quality of life of patients and their families facing the problems associated with life threatening illness, through the prevention and relief of suffering by means of early intervention and impeccable assessment and treatment of pain and other problems, physical, psycho-social and spiritual.” (WHO definition 2002)

Care?

22 May 2017 2 Comments

Beatrice Hale

Courtyard of Mitchell Hospital, Aberdeen

‘Care’ can be a misnomer. It should mean compassion, love, looking after, affection. All the positives in one word.

But it doesn’t.

My great-aunt, Georgina, lived for many years in The Mitchell Hospital, a nineteenth century Presbyterian Church supported ‘sheltered care’ facility. It was located on The Chanonry, the street which had grown up beside St Machar’s Cathedral in Old Aberdeen, a once independent township with a history of more than 1,000 years, and with many finds dating from about 4000 BC.

[Read more…] about Care?

Ageing poetically

6 March 2017 1 Comment

Janet Wainscott

Gary Glazner and Poetry Project participant

Some years ago, when my mother was still alive and living in a dementia-level rest home, I sat in a meeting for residents’ family members. The discussion turned to activities. One woman said her mother loved poetry, and asked whether poetry could be included in the activities offered. Someone else endorsed the comment and I thought that it would be something that my poetry-loving mother would enjoy. Nothing happened, but later, after my mother’s death, I decided it was an idea worth pursuing.

I was aware that reading, including poetry, is used in some rest homes and day programmes for older people, but I wanted to go beyond reading, discussion and reminiscence. I looked to Gary Glazner’s Alzheimer’s Poetry Project in the USA, and John Killick’s UK dementia poetry programme, In the Pink, for inspiration and guidance. Both projects combined the sharing of poems (especially well-known poems) with the creation of new poems.

[Read more…] about Ageing poetically

A privileged job

17 October 2016 13 Comments

Jillian Sullivan

When the job seeker representative asked me what qualifications I had for a job, I told her I had a Masters degree. “Don’t put anything high faluting like that on your job sheet,” she told me. “You’re only going to end up a cleaner.”

I think of that sometimes when I’m scrubbing toilets in the middle of the night in my job as Hospital Aid in a small country hospital.

And if I ever needed a reminder that this is a privileged job, I think of the young woman I was on shift with one night, telling me in the kitchen, “One night my friends hassled me. They said, You have to clean up shit. And they laughed at me. And I said, Yes I do. Because those people need someone to help them. And then they went quiet. And they haven’t hassled me since.”

[Read more…] about A privileged job

“Do you have anything for me to see?”

3 October 2016 1 Comment

Dr Janine Winters

When I started my career shift from Hospital Medicine to Palliative Medicine in 2004, my mother asked me “Why in the world do you want to work with people who are going to die? That is so depressing.” My answer then and my answer now is the same. “I am a doctor, I already work with people who are dying—and I know it can be done better.”

A caring bone in our bodies

27 June 2016 Leave a Comment

Beatrice Hale

For the past year or so I have been researching and writing the history of family caregiving. Let me say that in no way can this be a comprehensive piece of work! I have chosen to focus mainly on care of the elderly, since this reflects my professional experience as a social worker.

“It’s just what we do.”^[1] This quote opens Tim Cook’s 2007 The History of the Carers’ Movement, which outlines the history of the British organisation now known as Carers UK.^[2] But caring for others goes back a long, long time, as Lorna Tilley demonstrates in her fascinating book Theory and Practice in the Bioarcheology of Care. She quotes a number of bioarchaeological authorities who say that most remains of older Neanderthal showed healing, ‘implying that the Neanderthals had achieved a level of societal development where disabled individuals were well cared for by others of the social group’.^[3]