Working in community palliative care, I have the privilege of being welcomed into the lives of a diverse range of families while they reckon with the dying process. As a social worker, each time I enter the home of a client I attempt to understand their worldview through the glare of blinding grief and often disfranchised trauma.
Palliative care does not work to prolong life, nor does it intend to hasten death. Specialist palliative care looks at a person with incurable illness and acknowledges that they are not wholly their diagnosis. Good palliative care supports a person physiologically, spiritually, psychologically and socially. In assisting people to garner greater quality of life alongside their illness, research has shown that the cohort referred to palliative care can in fact live longer and happier than their initial prognosis may have suggested.
