Reflective practice during the pandemic
Professor Cooper describes his experience of providing reflective groups during the pandemic: At the height of the pandemic and afterwards I provided online reflective spaces to workers in hospital and …
Course: Grief, Loss, and Dying During COVID-19
The challenge of not being able to do your job
During the crisis many hospital staff and even policy makers in government were rapidly redeployed to work in unfamiliar places, and undertake specialist tasks they didn’t feel trained or equipped …
How to Talk End-of-Life Care with a Dying Patient
In the video, Atul Gawande, describes the ongoing process of having hard conversations with individuals nearing the end of their life. In, Being Mortal, he writes: Being mortal is about …
Making space: how the most important things emerge unexpectedly
In the final step of this activity, continuing with our aim of applying what we’ve learned to real world examples, Sharna describes what having hard conversations with patients looks and …
The impact on care homes
The following link will take you to an article from The Guardian that describes the impact on one care home: ‘We were lambs led to slaughter’: life inside a care …
Staying in touch
The person taking the photograph below described the sense of loss and alienation she experiences when visiting her mother in the care home where she lives. Her mother, who has …
Thinking about the experience of older vulnerable people.
Towards the end of Week 2 you read Tim Dartington’s ideas about the heroic and the stoical, about independence and dependence (you can revisit the article here). Let’s now explore …
A conscience at work: the pressure to discharge and its consequences
In the UK and other countries, hospitals became overwhelmed with Covid-19 patients who needed bed space. This led to a pressure to discharge patients as fast as possible. However, often …