Cicely Saunders

but also with psychology, the emotional, the social, the spiritual, all those elements of it as well.

So best level palliative care and the spirit of palliative care when Dame Cicely Saunders led on the development of palliative care and the palliative care ethos has always been that kind of holistic level of care.

So we need that.

We need it resourced so that people can have 24-7 holistic palliative care at the level they need it, including kind of access to specialist symptom control or rehab.

Yeah, I think that's important.

Another lecturer I went to, a guy called Michael Carney, He was qualified in Ireland many years ago and was a bit disillusioned with medicine, ended up working with Cicely Saunders over at St Christopher's Hospice, one of the first hospices that was in the modern era.

I heard him talk.

Absolutely brilliant.

to all the things he is doing, and that means all of them.

Just as you were speaking, one thing which came into mind when you were talking about the final few weeks of someone's life, it just reminded me of this quote from the biographer of Cicely Saunders.

Cicely Saunders, who, of course, was a Christian, I think used to go to All Souls, actually, who was the founder of Palliative Care.

And her biographer wrote this.

She said, "'It was possible to live a lifetime in a few weeks.

Absolutely, it's about living.

And I think, you know, if we can finish on my favorite quote by Dame Cicely Saunders.

So you would love her, Hayley, 'cause nurse, and then got frustrated, so became a doctor, and then got frustrated there, so became a social worker, you know?

Oh.

[laughs] So, and created the hospice movement in the UK.

So Dame Cicely Saunders.

And her, one of her most well-known quotes is that, "You matter because you are you, and you matter to the last moment of your life, and we will do all we can not only to help you die peacefully, but to live until you die." And I like to put live well until you die, because that's what the focus for aged care needs to be.

It's not a parking lot for God's waiting room, which is really offensive.

And I love what you said as well, sharing about you wanted your own hospice and you set up this virtual hospice.

Isn't it mad that so many of these things, like when Cicely Saunders set up the hospice movement in the 60s, All of these things happened with real heart, with real humanity.

Then it's become so medicalized, which is incredible because we've come so far, but we've lost that that connection.

And that's what I think now the movement of soul midwives, death doulas, end of life doula UK, living well, dying well, we're all doing our thing in our own way.

And certainly during my career, I have seen an enormous change as the way we address that.

When I was a medical student in London at the beginning of palliative care being developed, it was a really big thing that was happening because Cicely Saunders had seen death in hospitals, very medicalised deaths.

I wanted to change that and to begin to actually care for patients at the end of their life rather than inflicting more and more treatments on them.

And that was the beginning of, I didn't realize at the time, but obviously it was a major change in medicine to move to palliative care.