End-of-life care

To have a “good” death, it pays to discuss what you want before you fall ill – but so many of us are reluctant to do this.

By Geraldine Johns In Commentary

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9th July, 2011

Mag Features

Dr Barry Snow well remembers the day when, as a first-year doctor on a ward round, he and his superiors encountered the wife of a man diagnosed with cancer. She beseeched them not to tell her husband the news. It would be too upsetting, she argued. That wasn’t such a long time ago – the mid-80s – but it’s light years away from the place of the terminally ill patient that medical practice encourages today. Snow, now a neurologist and head of adult medicine at Auckland Hospital, is one of the leading figures in a new initiative for end-of-life care being introduced at a number of ...

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