Category: Healing and Helping Professionals

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The struggle to create a new craft of dying

—what is medicine’s role?

By Richard Smith

“Lyn Lofland’s The Craft of Dying (1978) is one of the most important books on post WWII death and dying practices that almost no one has read,” writes John Troyer, director of the Centre for Death and Society at Bath University. He thinks that everybody interested in death and dying should read the book. I agree. Potentially that means that every human being should read the book—because who cannot be interested in death, arguably the most important thing about us. Plus The Craft of Dying is short, easily read, full of compelling stories, and constructs a clear argument.

“Death can neither be “believed” nor “magicked” nor “scienced” away,” writes Lofland in her first line. But we can’t stop ourselves from thinking about it: “Everywhere and always humans think about it and develop beliefs regarding it and produce emotions toward it and do things relative to it. What they think, believe, feel, and do is, of course, variant. But that they think, believe, feel, and do is a universal.”

Every culture has developed beliefs and customs around death, but human death, argues Lofland, has changed dramatically in the past 60 years. Until that time people died mostly of infectious disease and injuries. The period of dying was short, and it was clear when people were dead. Medicine had little to offer. Now people die mostly of chronic disease, and the length of dying is long. Death is not easily defined, and doctors have much to offer, including long term ventilation, heroic operations, and drugs, some of them extremely expensive.

“In the past few decades, medical science has rendered obsolete centuries of experience, tradition, and language about our mortality, and created a new difficulty for mankind: how to die,” writes Atul Gawande in Being Mortal, published in 2014. Lofland wrote something similar in 1978: “There exists currently no widely accepted, fully articulated, well-integrated dogma that gives ‘being dying’ its meaning or its place in the larger scheme of things.”

A cultural vacuum has been created, and inevitably attempts are underway to fill the vacuum. We have entered a new age of what Lofland calls “thanatalogical chic”: in the contemporary cliché “death is the new black.” We have to decide how to die, where to die, how to dispose of the dead, how to mourn, and, most difficult of all, what death means.

One response has been what Lofland teasingly calls “the Happy Death Movement.” It is an inchoate social movement with many practitioners, strands, and different views, but Lofland sees patterns that were emerging in the 70s and are still emerging.

Firstly, a social movement needs an enemy, and the enemy of the Happy Death Movement is death denial, death as the great taboo. Lofland defines the enemy: ”America is a death-denying society…death is a taboo topic…death makes Americans uncomfortable so they run from …death is hidden in America because Americans deny it….” For America, Lofland’s home, we could substitute any high-income country—or even any high-income group within a poor country. “The consequences of all this denial and repression are,” continues Lofland, “asserted to be quite terrible: exorbitant funeral costs and barbaric funeral practices, inhumane handling of dying in hospitals, ostracism of the dying from the living, inauthentic communication with the fatally ill, an unrealistic, mechanical, non-organic view of life, and so forth.”

Lofland is dismissive of the idea of death as taboo: “One might consider it somewhat odd that the statement that death is a taboo topic in America should continue to be asserted in the face of nearly a decade of non-stop talking on the subject.” Talk, writing, and storytelling about death has continued unabated ever since and probably increased. It is probably fair to say, however, that there is much less familiarity with the experience of death: dying people, the signs of death being close, dead bodies, and the disposal of the dead.

A social movement also needs something to shoot for, and for the Happy Death Movement it’s some form of idealised premodern death, with the dying person at home surrounded by loved ones and calmly bidding them goodbye. Lofland is dismissive of this as well, including in her book stories of the dying being buried alive (in Samoa) and ignored while families party (in Tahiti).

As you would expect, the attempts to create new behaviours and beliefs around death reflect broader cultural trends, which Lofland identifies in the United States as “ ‘humanistic-counterculture’ denouncement of modern society in general, which denouncement emphasizes the Western world’s dehumanizing, unemotional, technologically dominated, inauthentic, and constricted character.” That cultural trend is alive and flourishing in most Western societies. “Why not,” asks Lofland, “with Carl Jung, speak of “the achievement of death” and view dying as the final creative task of our lives?” A director of spiritual services (what used to be called a chaplain) I met recently in a hospice told me of the tremendous pressure on people to have a “good death.” This immediately evoked for me the pressure on mothers to have a “good” or “natural” birth.

Emphasising that the Happy Death Movement is still forming, Lofland identifies how the movement will make dying better. Firstly, it’s essential to talk about it. For example, the Order of the Good Death, an organisation founded by a Californian mortician, has eight tenets—and three of them concern talking about death

“2. I believe that the culture of silence around death should be broken through discussion, gatherings, art, innovation, and scholarship.

3. I believe that talking about and engaging with my inevitable death is not morbid, but displays a natural curiosity about the human condition.

7. I believe that my family and friends should know my end-of-life wishes, and that I should have the necessary paperwork to back-up those wishes.”

Secondly, death must be rearranged, moved from hospital to hospices and the home. Death in hospital is failure. Thirdly, we must legislate death with advanced decisions and assisted dying.

Lofland also identifies emerging components of the new craft of dying. Expressivity is essential, but it’s also important to not just embrace death, but to celebrate it. (I’ve done this with my talk, delivered once at the Edinburgh Festival, “Death: the upside.”) Finally—and for me surprisingly—the Happy Death Movement wants us to believe in immortality. Lofland describes how Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, who might be called the doyen of the Happy Death Movement and whose hugely influential book On Death and Dying proposed in 1969 the five stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance), came to believe in immortality. The pursuit of immortality, long a dream and arguably the unique selling point of Christianity, now attracts serious people and serious money. 

The other two components of the emerging craft of dying are expressivity and positivity. Talk and write about your dying and coming death and celebrate your coming death and the death of those you love. New rituals will be needed, and some like “living funerals” are beginning.

Lofland is a sociologist, an academic, an observer, but you feel that she is not in fully sympathy with the Happy Death Movement. Indeed, she conjures the idea of a Dismal Death Movement to counter the Happy Death Movement: “If expressivity comes to be widely accepted as the only way to achieve a decent death, the emotionally reticent will find themselves under great pressure to ‘share.’ If the idea that death and dying provide new opportunities for self-improvement becomes common currency, the chronic under achiever will find himself facing one more opportunity for failure. Not ‘getting off’ on death may become as déclassé as sexual unresponsiveness. Then perhaps, a ‘dismal death’ movement will rise to wipe the smile from the face of death and restore the ‘Grim Reaper’ to his historic place of honor.”

There is a little about medicine and healthcare in Lofland’s book, and nor does the Order of the Good Death have much to say on the subject. But I wonder how much medicine and healthcare—gigantic, well-funded enterprises—might come to fill the need for new ways to die. Ivan Illich certainly argued that that was the case in his book Limits to Medicine, published at about the same time as Lofland’s book. Death “is now that point at which the human organism refuses any further input of treatment…Health, or the autonomous power to cope, has been expropriated down to the last breath. Technical death has won its victory over dying. Mechanical death has conquered and destroyed all other deaths.” Indeed, it is by taking on death that “health care has become a monolithic world religion.”

All those who read Lofland’s book agree that it could have been published in 2018 not 1978 and be equally relevant. The struggle to create a new craft of dying is far from over, and those of us in medicine and heath care have a particular responsibility to think and act on medicine’s role in the struggle. Almost certainly its role should be smaller.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Machine Learning Could Improve End-of-Life Communication

Using machine learning, researchers were able to better understand what end-of-life conversations look like, which could help providers improve their communication.

By Jessica Kent

Machine learning tools could analyze conversations between providers and patients about palliative care, leading to improved communication around serious illness and end-of-life treatment, according to a study conducted at the University of Vermont’s (UVM) Conversation Lab.

Discussions about treatment options and prognoses amid serious, life-threatening illnesses are a delicate balance for nurses and doctors. Providers are communicating with people who don’t know what the future holds, and these conversations are very difficult to navigate.

Researchers at UVM wanted to understand the types of conversations patients and providers have around serious illness. The team set out to identify common features of these conversations and determine if they have common storylines.
“We want to understand this complex thing called a conversation,” said Robert Gramling, director of the lab in UVM’s Larner College of Medicine who led the study. “Our major goal is to scale up the measurement of conversations so we can re-engineer the healthcare system to communicate better.”

Researchers used machine learning techniques to analyze 354 transcripts of palliative care conversations collected by the Palliative Care Communication Research Initiative, involving 231 patients in New York and California.

They broke each conversation into ten parts with an equal number of words in each, and examined how the frequency and distribution of words referring to time, illness terminology, sentiment, and words indicating possibility and desirability changed between each decile. Conversations tended to progress from talking about the past to talking about the future, and from happier to sadder sentiments.

“We picked up some strong signals,” said Gramling. “There was quite a range, they went from pretty sad to pretty happy.”

Discussions also tended to shift from talking about symptoms at the beginning, to treatment options in the middle and prognosis at the end. Additionally, the use of modal verbs like “can,” “will,” and “might,” that refer to probability and desirability also increased as conversations progressed.

The findings reveal the importance of stories in healthcare for patients, researchers noted.

“At the end there was more evaluation than description,” said Gramling. “What we found supports the importance of narrative in medicine.”

The team is now focused on using the machine learning algorithm to identify the different types of conversations that can occur in healthcare. This could help providers understand what might make a “good” conversation around palliative care, and how different conversations require different responses. Providers could then match patients to interventions they need the most.

“One type of conversation may lead to an ongoing need for information, while another may have an ongoing need for functional support,” said Gramling. “So one of the ways those types can help us is to identify what are the resources we are going to need for individual patients and families so that we’re not just applying the same stuff to everybody.”

A deeper understanding of these conversations will also help reveal what aspects and behaviors associated with these conversations are most valuable for patients and their families. Educators could then effectively train providers to have the skills needed in palliative care.

Researchers believe that the most useful application of the machine learning tool could be at the systemic level, which could monitor how patients respond to providers in aggregate.  

“I think this is going to be a potentially important research tool for us to begin fostering an understanding of a taxonomy of conversations that we have so that we can begin to learn how to improve upon each one of those types,” said Gramling.

“We already measure other processes of clinical care, we just don’t do it routinely for actual communication.”

Researchers have recently applied artificial intelligence tools to the realm of palliative care. A study published in September 2019 demonstrated that a predictive analytics tool can help increase the number of palliative care consultations for seriously ill individuals, leading to improved quality of life for patients and their families.

“There’s widespread recognition of the need to improve the quality of palliative care for seriously ill patients, and palliative care consultation has been associated with improved outcomes for these patients,” said the study’s lead author, Katherine Courtright, MD, an assistant professor of Pulmonary, Allergy and Critical Care, and Hospice and Palliative Medicine.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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End-of-life doulas:

The professionals who guide dying people

Christy Marek is a certified end-of-life doula: she accompanies dying people and their families.

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Doulas are tasked with maintaining a sense of calm for dying people and those around them, and opening the conversation about death and loss, topics that can often be taboo

In October of 2016, Gregory Gelhorn ran the Twin Cities Marathon. Seven months later, he was diagnosed with ALS, a progressive neurodegenerative disease that causes nerve cells to break down, resulting in muscle weakness and atrophy. The average life expectancy of an ALS patient, once diagnosed, ranges from about two to five years. The cause of ALS is not fully understood, and no cure is known. Gelhorn was in his mid-40s.

“It was a shock,” said Kathy Fessler, Gelhorn’s sister. “He was always the one who took the best care of himself.”

Dying from ALS is a singularly awful experience; the disease causes the body to progressively deteriorate while the mind remains clear and lucid. Gelhorn had loved being active. He had played three sports in high school, coached girls’ basketball and served as a travel director at Lakeville North high school in Lakeville, Minnesota. The disease progressed rapidly; soon, he was using a wheelchair and relied on a BiPAP machine to breathe. Doctors estimated he only had a few months left. Gelhorn and his family – his two teenage children, wife, parents, and siblings – began to grieve.

In the midst of it all, Fessler happened to see an article in the Star Tribune about Christy Marek, a certified end-of-life doula who lived only a few miles away. Fessler contacted Marek, who soon took on Gelhorn as a patient.

A doula, typically, is a professional who helps mothers during pregnancy and childbirth. Unlike midwives, doulas do not serve in a medical capacity; rather, their primary role is to provide emotional, physical and psychological support.

The practice originated in the natural childbirth movement in the US in the 1970s, alongside the Lamaze method and the popularity of alternatives to hospital birth, like water birth and home birth. That same generation of Americans who were having children in the 70s are now approaching their twilight years, and the practice of serving as a doula has expanded in scope. End-of-life doulas use the same concept as birth doulas: they provide support for the dying.

“On all sorts of levels, I think the Baby Boomers, that generation has just been here to shake things up,” said Marek. “The natural birthing movement, they did that. And now it’s the same thing. They’re saying, no, I don’t want the death my parents had. We are rich in possibility, why can’t I make this whatever I want it to be?”

End-of-life doulas are sometimes called death doulas, though many have reservations about the term.

“To me, end-of-life is a process,” said Marek. “The work I do with people isn’t just about that one point in time when somebody dies.”

Although doulas are not required to have medical training, many come from the healthcare field. Shelby Kirillin, an end-of-life doula based in Richmond, Virginia, has also been a neurointensive trauma nurse for over 20 years. It was her experiences in the neuro-ICU that led her towards becoming a doula. Many of the deaths she had seen there, she explained, struck her as cold, sterile and lonely.

“I just couldn’t imagine that the person dying had ever envisioned their death to be like that,” she said. “Dying isn’t just medical. It’s spiritual.”

Fascinated by the idea of a structured approach to end-of-life care that prioritized the individual wishes of the dying, Kirillin enrolled in a doula training course with the International End of Life Doula Association (Inelda), a not-for-profit that promotes the approach. Although there is no centralized regulatory body for doulas, training and certification programs are offered by a number of organizations, including Inelda and the Larner College of Medicine at the University of Vermont.
“There’s so much fear and anxiety about death,” said Janie Rakow, the president of Inelda. “The doulas are there to calm everyone down. They work with the dying and their families to educate, to explain what’s happening. That what they’re seeing is part of the dying process.”

Rakow and her business partner, hospice social worker Henry Fersko-Weiss, founded Inelda in 2015 to train doulas and promote their use in hospices, hospitals, prisons and homeless shelters. Their training program covers topics like vigil planning, active listening and doula self-care.

Part of what doulas do is open the conversation about death and loss, topics that can often be taboo or deeply uncomfortable for the dying or their family.

“Can you imagine if a woman was going through labor and no one around her was talking about it or preparing for it? There’d be an uproar if we treated birth like we treat death,” said Kirillin. “You have to talk about it. You’re dying and you’re no longer going to be here.”

Doulas help their patients plan out their deaths: talking with them about their wishes, and how they would like to spend their last day. Some prefer to die in a hospital, others at home. They decide who they want around them, whether it’s with all their family and friends, or a religious figure, or alone. They choose the details of the setting, whether they want to hear music, whether they want to have someone hold their hand, and what rituals – religious or secular – they want performed.

Doulas often also perform legacy work, the practice of guiding the dying to create tangible artifacts to leave behind for their loved ones. Sometimes, it’s a photo album, a collection of recipes, or a video archive. One of Rakow’s patients wrote a series of letters to her pregnant daughter’s unborn child, expressing her hopes and wishes for a granddaughter she knew she would never meet.

As death approaches, doulas are tasked with maintaining a sense of calm for dying people and those around them.

“One of my patients this past spring, as he was transitioning, he started to vomit,” said Kirillin. “I reminded everyone that when a woman is laboring a birth, sometimes she vomits. It’s the body’s natural way. Let’s just make him comfortable.”

Finally, the last part of a doula’s work comes a few weeks afterwards, when the doula meets with the deceased’s loved ones to reprocess and discuss everything that has occurred.

“It’s after the casserole brigade has come and gone, and everyone’s gone back to work,” Kirillin said. “We talk about grief and bereavement. You’re not going crazy. You can be happy and sad in the same moment. There is no timeline.”

Of course, the practice of guiding the dying on their final journey is not new. Death is not an unknown phenomenon, and the act of tending to the dying has existed as long as human civilization itself. Marek has a theory for why the need for a formalized approach to death has manifested now, in these particular circumstances – why the dying feel the need to contract a trained professional, rather than being able to rely on a more organic source of support.

“In America, a few generations ago, our communities were doing this work,” she said. “The reason the role is showing up in a formalized way now is that we don’t have those community ties any more, not in the same way, and certainly not the same level of responsibility to each other as used to be woven into our communities.”

Kirillin agreed: “I would love for our culture to never need me,” she said.

Much of doula work is the very definition of emotional labor, and though Janie Rakow suspects some doulas feel conflicted about taking money for their services, she sees the profession as no different from that of therapists or hospice workers.

“I had one of my patients tell me I wasn’t charging them enough,” she said, though Inelda also encourages pro bono work, and many doulas serve purely on a volunteer basis. She also cautions her doulas not to take on too many cases in a row, and to be cognizant of their own mental health. But, she said, the act of tending to the dying is not as depressing as many assume; rather, it can be very rewarding.

“When you sit with a dying person and they take their last breath, it is as amazing and awe-inspiring as someone taking their first,” said Kirillin. “It is important, and sad, and needs to be cherished.”

Gregory Gelhorn died in September 2018. He spent his last day in his home, surrounded by his family. Together, they watched a movie and listened to 90s prog-rock.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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The Cost Of Dying

Hospice’s Biggest Fans Now Have Second Thoughts

The rapid growth of the hospice industry has exposed the burden of putting the family in charge of the death bed.

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The booming hospice industry is changing what it looks like to die in the U.S. Rather than under the care of doctors and nurses in a hospital, more Americans than not now spend their final days in familiar surroundings, often at home, being cared for by loved ones.

While hospice has been a beautiful experience during a difficult time for many families, a yearlong reporting project by WPLN finds end-of-life support often falls short of what they need.

“Our long-term care system in this country is really using family, unpaid family members. That’s our situation,” says professor Katherine Ornstein, who studies the last year of life at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. “As we increasingly see that we want to provide home-based care, we’re relying even more on caregivers. And it does take a toll.”

The federal government has found that families often misunderstand what they’re entitled to when they elect hospice. And many still have to pay out of pocket for nursing home services or private caregivers, which Medicare rarely covers — all while the hospice agency is paid nearly $200 a day.

Hospice has catapulted from a sector led by nonprofits and volunteers to one dominated by investor-owned companies — including several based in the Nashville area such as Amedysis and Compassus — with more growth expected.

In the process, hospice has ballooned into a nearly $19 billion industry. It’s now the most profitable service sector in health care, as the industry’s business model relies heavily on unpaid family caregivers.

“This seems like it’s in sync with patient-centered care,” says Ornstein, “but the reality of that situation may be very, very challenging.

“I think we have a responsibility to really think about whether the families can handle this.”

‘A Longer-Term Thing’

The Fortners could be the poster family for hospice of old. On an overcast morning last May, they gathered with dozens of other grieving families at Alive Hospice’s residence in Murfreesboro for the nonprofit agency’s annual butterfly release.

McCoy Fortner, 8, opened a triangular box and a dormant monarch began to twitch.

“You can also whisper to it to tell the person in heaven what you want to say,” he explained.

He held the winged messenger on his forefinger until the black and orange wings perked up and stretched out. He relayed a few words to his father, Jeremy, who died two years ago of cancer.

“Thank you for being my best dad,” he said as the monarch took flight.

McCoy’s mom, Elicia, stood behind her son with tears in her eyes. Her husband called off endless chemotherapy. He was on hospice at home and then moved to a residential hospice facility where he passed away. Between the two, he was on hospice for 10 days.

Elicia Fortner said she just wishes they had stopped curative treatment and switched to hospice sooner.

“I don’t know if I really understood the options,” she said. “I didn’t realize hospice could be a longer-term thing.”

The Hospice Nudge

The average amount of time patients spend on hospice has been creeping up steadily, amid an industry-wide push that has aligned most of the interests in health care. The Affordable Care Act gave hospitals new incentives to reduce the number of deaths that occur in the hospital or shortly after a patient’s stay. Some studies suggest that’s caused an uptick in hospice use. And many doctors have been sold on the idea of prioritizing quality of life in the final days.

More patients are also eligible: Hospice has expanded beyond cancer to any terminal illness.

Very few people now die in a hospice facility. More often, hospice is received at home or, increasingly, in a nursing home.

But some of the biggest end-of-life evangelists are beginning to see unintended consequences of putting families in charge of the death bed.

Jessica Zitter, an emergency physician in Oakland, Calif., wrote a book about needlessly dying in the hospital on ventilators with very little consideration about quality of life. She advocates for prioritizing comfort care, which often means recommending hospice. When a patient has been told they have less than six months to live, Medicare and most private insurance will allow them to sign up for hospice services meant primarily to help them die in peace.

Zitter filmed one documentary called “Extremis.” It showed the impossible end-of-life decisions that have to be made in a hospital.

Then, she decided to make a second documentary, still in production, following a husband who took his wife home on hospice after ending cancer treatment.

Zitter met with Rick Tash and Bambi Fass for the nine weeks she spent in at-home hospice. The storyline didn’t play out as expected.

“It made me realize how naïve I — the doctor of death — was,” Zitter says. “This is this beautiful love story of these two people. Then you hear him say, ‘I didn’t sign up for this.’”

Tash became overwhelmed — from managing Fass’s morphine doses to getting her to the toilet every few hours.

With at-home hospice, everyday caretaking — and even many tasks that would be handled by professionals in a hospital or nursing home — are left to the family.

Medicare requires agencies to provide a few baths and a nurse check-in each week. But government data reveals that, on average, a nurse or aide is there at the house only about half an hour a day.

Zitter sat Tash down at his kitchen table, with his granddaughter on his lap. She encouraged calling in reinforcements.

“Asking for more support from hospice, if you need it, is really important,” she told him.

“Yeah, but what they offered me was a volunteer for two hours, one day a week,” Tash responded.

“That’s it?” Zitter asked.

“That’s what they offered,” Tash said.

Zitter was stunned. She realized Rick was getting all hospice had to provide, and it wasn’t nearly enough.

“The good death isn’t as easy as you might think,” she says. “We’ve got to put some things in place here so we can make it more likely that people can achieve that.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Why people choose medically assisted death revealed through conversations with nurses

Without an understanding of the complexities of medically assisted dying, it’s difficult for patients and families to make good decisions.

By and

Since Canada legalized Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) in 2016, as of Oct. 31, 2018, more than 6,700 Canadians have chosen medications to end their life.

Canadians who meet eligibility requirements can opt to self-administer or have a clinician administer these medications; the vast majority of people choosing MAiD have had their medications delivered by physicians or nurse practitioners. Canada is the first country to permit nurse practitioners to assess for medically assisted dying eligibility and to provide it.

The precise meaning and implications of MAiD — in particular, who can request medical assistance in dying in Canada — is still evolving through court rulings. Québec’s Supreme Court recently struck down the reasonably foreseeable death requirement under the Criminal Code and the end-of-life requirement under Québec’s Act Respecting End-of-Life Care.

Without the requirement of a reasonably foreseeable death, it is likely that other legal challenges will occur to extend assisted dying to other groups such as those whose sole underlying condition is severe mental illness.

Involvement of nurses

Our research has explored how the nursing profession is regulating the new area of responsibility towards medically assisted dying and how nursing ethics might guide policy and practical implications of nurses’ experiences.

Current legislation guards the right of health-care providers to conscientiously object to participation in MAiD. Nurses who do conscientiously object have a professional obligation to inform their employers of that objection, to report requests for MAiD, and to not abandon their clients. They also must ensure that their choices are based on “informed, reflective choice and are not based on prejudice, fear or convenience.”

The nurses who surround the process of medically assisted dying are an important source of insight into the complex and nuanced conversations our society needs to have about what it is like to choose, or be involved with, this new option at the end of life, and to be involved in supporting patients and their families toward death with compassion.

Researchers are following how the nursing profession is regulating nurses’ involvement in medically assisted dying.

Impoverished stereotypes

Our most recent research involved interviews with 59 nurse practitioners or registered nurses across Canada who accompanied patients and families along the journey of medically assisted dying or who had chosen to conscientiously object. Nurses worked across the spectrum of care in acute, residential and home-care settings.

During our research, and as we followed media stories, we became aware that as with other morally contentious issues, involvement in MAiD has often been discussed in one-dimensional ways: We noted stereotypes of health-care providers and patients who heroically conquer suffering, death and the system by taking control of what might otherwise have been a difficult and prolonged dying. We also observed caricatures of oppositional or religious right-wing persons and institutions who stand in the way of compassion and dignity.

Neither of these perspectives do justice to the complexities of MAiD as it is enacted. Without an understanding of those complexities, it is difficult for patients and families to make good decisions.

Nurses accounts of MAiD

Nurses told us that medically assisted dying is about so much more than the act itself. Medically assisted dying is a conversational journey with patients that lasts weeks or even months.

These discussions patients have over time with skilled and compassionate health-care professionals help to determine whether this is what they really want, or whether there are other options that might relieve their suffering.

Conversations between patients and their families are essential to negotiating a common understanding and moving forward together.

Indeed, evidence has suggested that these conversations, when experienced as meaningful by patients, may help to alleviate the suffering that leads to the request for a medically assisted death. This is particularly true if the suffering has arisen from the sense of isolation.

If and when patients decide to proceed with MAiD, then conversations are required to ensure that all of the organizational details (what, where, when, how) are patient-centred choices and that those who are involved know the part they are to play. After the act of medically assisted dying, it is compassionate conversations that support families in navigating an uncharted bereavement process.

So yes, medically assisted dying is about supporting autonomy, but it is also about understanding that autonomy exists within, and is shaped by, our constellation of relationships. We need to be talking more about the essential nature of what it means to have a good death.

Complex reasons to choose death

MAiD is often spoken of as the definitive intervention that ensures control over the alleviation of suffering. But, we have learned that MAiD can also be chosen as the antidote to a system that fails in compassion or equitable palliative care access.

It may seem the perfect solution for rural and remote patients who want a home death but are unable to find sufficient palliative care in their context.

It may seem the best option for patients who do not want to enter what they perceive to be the dehumanizing environments of residential care.

We heard a story of one man who had overstayed the time allowed on a palliative care unit. His doctor was a conscientious objector to medically assisted dying so each time health professionals planned to transfer him to residential care, the man asked for a medically assisted death. In doing so his stay in palliative care was assured.

We need to ensure that inequitable access or lack of caregiving networks do not become the default reasons for requesting a medically assisted death.

We heard other stories of patients who were not willing to tax their caregivers any longer, particularly if those caregivers sent cues that they were exhausted.

So, while medically assisted dying does promise control over people’s suffering, it can also be used as a form of resistance to a challenging system or depleted support.

We need to plan ways to ensure that inequitable access or lack of caregiving networks do not become the default reasons for requesting a medically assisted death.

Deeply impactful

Nurses emphasized how important it is to have preparatory conversations repeatedly. Organizing an assisted death is labour-intensive for all involved; it requires thoughtful and detailed planning within the care system and among families and support networks.

Often the first time that patients and families hear a detailed explanation of the process is when the nurse or the physician first assesses eligibility. Nurses said it is not uncommon for patients to experience uncertainty, to vacillate in their decision around an assisted death, or to experience fear at the moment of death.

It is tough to talk about your uncertainty when so many have invested time and energy into planning your death. At the time of assisted death, nurses and physicians go to extraordinary lengths to ensure a “good death” by normalizing the process, fulfilling patient wishes and providing exemplary clinical care.

Despite all of this, the death is often deeply impactful because it is so different than the death we have known where people gradually fade away. Persons receiving medically assisted death are fully there one minute, and gone the next.

Within minutes they go from talking, to unconscious, to a grey pallour that signifies death, and this “greying” affects even seasoned health-care providers. The death can provoke an array of overwhelming emotions in health-care providers and families alike, both positive and negative.

With the changing landscape of medically assisted dying in Canada, the need for reflective conversations becomes ever more urgent. We need to better understand how medically assisted dying changes the nature of death to which we have become accustomed and how those changes impact all those involved.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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New program provides mobile end-of-life support to people in poverty

The new Palliative Outreach Resource Team (PORT) brings compassionate medical care and support to people living in poverty at end-of-life. Dr. Fraser Black,Island Medical Program’s associate dean of student affairs, is a team physician.

Death may be the great equalizer but the availability of good end-of-life care is rarely equitable. Now, a new mobile palliative care program designed to address that inequity is providing care and dignity to people with life-limiting illnesses who are homeless and living in poverty in Victoria. 

The Palliative Outreach Resource Team (PORT) is a collaboration of the University of Victoria, Island Health, Victoria Cool Aid and Victoria Hospice. PORT acts as a bridge between people with serious illness and their caregivers, palliative care, and other health and social support systems. 

The program is built upon lessons learned from a three-year study led by UVic palliative care researcher Kelli Stajduhar, lead investigator of the Equity in Palliative Approaches to Care program with the Institute on Aging & Lifelong Health and the School of Nursing. The study followed 25 people living homeless or barely housed while struggling with life-threatening medical conditions. The 2018 report Too little, too late: How we fail vulnerable Canadians as they die and what to do about it, found that homeless and barely housed people have to navigate many systems—health care, housing, social care—and that as their health declines, their ability to access these systems also declines. The big takeaway: despite a terminal diagnosis of cancer, heart failure or lung disease, those who were able to access palliative care actually experienced an improvement in quality of life. 

For PORT’s first year, the clinical team will be funded by Island Health and Saint Elizabeth Health Community Enterprise, a social enterprise with a commitment to end-of-life care for marginalized communities. Mirroring similar models in Toronto and Calgary, people can self-refer or be referred by their caregivers to a palliative care nurse and a physician who provide whole person care, manage the pain and symptoms related to life-limiting illness, support chosen family and caregivers, and provide grief and bereavement support. Chosen family and caregivers in this population include “street family” and shelter, housing, harm reduction, and peer and support workers from inner-city community organizations who are doing the bulk of end-of-life care for people living in poverty. 

The Vancouver Foundation is funding the UVic-led evaluation of the program, as well as the development of initiatives to increase access to and quality of palliative care in the inner city. The PORT team, which began service in July, has supported three deaths and is currently supporting seven people who are dying.

“For almost a decade, providers in our community have cobbled together resources to meet the needs of our clients who are living with unmet palliative needs,” says Grey Showler, director of health and support services at Cool Aid. “We are thrilled to see PORT come to life.”

“Over the next year, we will be implementing this model of palliative care in collaboration with organizations and people who have expertise in care and support for homeless and vulnerably housed people at end-of-life including street families,” says Jill Gerke, director of the palliative and end-of-life care program with Island Health. “We are using research and promising practices to inform the development of this model adapted to our community that bridges existing support and services.”

“Palliative care isn’t a ‘thing’ or a ‘place’ but an approach that focuses on whole-person care for the person, their family and community. This approach necessitates a community response where everyone sees their responsibility and their part in care for dying people,” says Stajduhar.

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NC Women Embrace Ancient Practice of Death Caregiving

Durham, N.C., resident Omisade Burney-Scott (right) with fellow death doula Vivette Jefferies-Logan.

By Cynthia Greenlee

Ivette Jeffries-Logan and Omisade Burney-Scott are friends for life – and collaborators in death. Three years ago when a mutual friend realized she wouldn’t survive pancreatic cancer, the two central North Carolina women were within the circle of friends she summoned.

Over the course of about three months, the women stayed at Cynthia Brown’s side, as the community activist and one-time Durham City Council member went about the process of dying.

They rubbed her head, kept a watchful eye on her pain, and helped her decipher doctorspeak. And when her spirits appeared to lag, they’d tell her jokes and sing at her bedside.

This, Jeffries-Logan says, was a good death: “If I can help someone at the end of life heal and be clear, I will. There are some things we are required to do alone, but we are not isolated. We are community people. What happens to my nation happens to me. What happens to me happens to my nation.”

Jeffries-Logan and Burney-Scott are death doulas; their form of caregiving is both old and new. The ancient Greek word “doula,” meaning “woman servant” or “slave,” was repurposed in the 1960s to describe birth workers who offer encouragement, back rubs, and other assistance during childbirth.

These days, end-of-life doulas, sometimes called death midwives, are an emerging profession in the growing death positivity movement, which urges a paradigm shift for thinking and talking about death as natural and not inherently traumatic.

They provide nonmedical support to help ease the final transition for the terminally ill. But it’s not merely about that culminating moment, “The End.” They help the dying and their loved ones navigate death with all its “before and afters” – including sickness, acceptance, finding resources for all the legal housekeeping, funeral planning, and bereavement.
For Burney-Scott and Jeffries-Logan, it’s the highest calling.

Sisters in ritual, they performed sacraments of soothing and release drawn from their West African and Indigenous spiritual traditions. Burney-Scott is African American and was initiated in the West African Ife religious practice, and Jeffries-Logan is a member of the Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation, a tribe rooted in the North Carolina Piedmont region.

Being a death doula “is not fun. But it’s an honor,” says Burney-Scott, a healer and longtime advocate who most recently worked as a reproductive justice organizer in North Carolina.

She stumbled into the practice when her mother’s dear friend, a hospice nurse, showed Burney-Scott what to do at her mother’s passing.

“I didn’t want to do it,” she says. “The thing I feared most, from when I was a little girl and even when my mom was healthy, was losing my mother. She was that mom that all my friends would talk to, the mom who could let you know [you] were the most special person in the world even when she was yelling at you to do your laundry.”

Near the end, her mother made her retrieve a manila envelope containing her will, insurance information, deeds – the bureaucracy of death. But without ever using the word “doula,” her friend guided Burney-Scott in ushering out of this world the woman who had brought her into it.

“Aunt Cora” encouraged Burney-Scott to whisper her love in her mother’s ear, to hold her hand, play music, and to be present in “an organic practice.” One day, when her mother struggled to breathe, Cora assured Burney-Scott that she didn’t need to fetch doctors – that nothing was wrong.

“She’s leaving,” Cora told her, a simple statement that’s also a tenet of end-of-life care: Death can’t be controlled, but you can prepare for some aspects of it.

Because there is no universal or official training, no licensing and no regulation, there is no official estimate of how many death doulas operate in this country.

But death and dying are constant. And beyond the eulogies and coffins, there’s a clear and growing need for death-related services. The number of Medicare-approved home- and hospital-based hospices, for example, rose from barely 30 to slightly more than 3,400 between 1984 and 2009. A decade later, more than 4,500 exist, according to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

Groups such as the International End-of-Life Doula Association and others train and certify doulas, providing hands-on experience, like a practicum. Still, many death doulas enter the field as Burney-Scott did, pressed into duty by a family member’s passing.

Few can make it into a full-time, paying job. Others have a background in the clergy or are people of faith, are volunteers involved in work with the sick and shut-in, or are shamans or healers.

Still others start end-of-life doulaing because they are nurses, midwives, or health care professionals who, through experience, have come to know that end of life is more than just what happens to your body.

Merilynne Rush, a nurse and home-birth midwife, co-founded Lifespan Doulas, an organization that trains and certifies end-of-life doulas. In three years, she says, the group has trained 200 people. She sees the need to educate and vet death doulas even while she thinks that community-trained doulas are valuable and necessary.

“There are so many people who are called in their communities [to do this] that no one should tell them they can’t,” Rush says. “I’d never be able to go into every community. That’s one reason for never having any kind of regulation that imposes a state-sanctioned structure that says you are in or out.

“At the same time, when you are working within a medical organization, they need to know you are OK and there are some standards,” she adds. “Training should never be mandatory, but optional.”

A diversity consultant who focuses on Native communities and trauma, Jeffries-Logan distrusts what she believes is a move toward professionalization.

Her death doula work is grounded in Indigenous customs, and communicating with the ancestors does not happen through curricula. Heeding a call from her ancestors, she did a traveling ceremony, designed to pave a deceased person’s road to the afterlife, for an infant relative who died before he turned a year old.

As part of a common tribal custom, she won’t speak the name of the deceased aloud for a year; to do so could keep the spirit tied to its temporal life – now a thing of the past – and distract it from the arduous journey to the ancestors.

Neither she nor Burney-Scott takes money for what they do. Rather, they extend their services to family and friends based on existing connections and an understanding that death is cultural and clinical. “It’s not like I was going to roll up and do this with just anyone. I don’t do shallow-ass relationships,” Jeffries-Logan says.

She questions what happens when the training moves out of informal community pedagogy and into a classroom.

“Who’s the certifying body? Who has the funds to pay for services?” she asks. She thinks of formalizing death doula work in the same vein as yoga, an Indian spiritual system that has been co-opted from communities of color and networks of caring to be dominated by White instructors who teach a fraction – the poses, the breathing – of the whole for pay.

Both women know that communities of color lag in accessing end-of-life care – whether due to cultural beliefs, experience and well-founded fear of racism in medical settings, lack of insurance or financial resources, or misconceptions about what’s available.

For example, Black people represented 8% of those receiving Medicare-funded hospice benefits in 2017, compared to 82% for White people.

In many Southern Black communities, people won’t talk about death, Burney-Scott offers. “There is truth in our mouth. You can manifest things with your word. Don’t talk about death [lest] you invite it in.”

That goes for other communities, as well. A 2010 study comparing Latino immigrant to White cancer caregivers found that the Latinos were surprised and even disturbed by transparent talk about death in hospice pamphlets and consultations.

Furthermore, Rush says that generally when death is imminent, “most people are overwhelmed and don’t know where to turn. They don’t even know that they can get hospice earlier. And even then, they may have a nurse come in for a few hours or an aide, but they aren’t there all the time. People have to rely on their community and network.”

And that’s just what Cynthia Brown did once she accepted that she wasn’t going to beat cancer, calling on the women her family members sometimes referred to as “Cynthia’s girls.”

“She invited us into the process from the very beginning. We swung into action on the logistical things: running errands, taking her to appointments, making meals,” Burney-Scott says.

“And then she said, ‘I want to cut my hair.’ She had 12 braids left. Each one of us cut two braids. Then, she called and said, ‘Hey, will you come over and help me write my memorial?”

She summoned Jeffries-Logan and another friend to help her assemble and bless her ancestors’ altar. With trademark precision and humor, she even planned who would cook at her funeral repast or meal: not her many loving White friends; she didn’t trust their chops in the kitchen.

Her death doulas and friends, in turn, called on each other, their own histories of loss, and their ancestors to help guide Brown through her own departure.

And when the end came, the friends all rolled to the hospital one last time. Burney-Scott donned her trademark white head wrap and packed a bag with crystals and Florida water, a citrusy blend believed to have calming properties.

Jeffries-Logan carried tobacco as an offering; red cedar to represent blood and life force; water from the Eno River, which courses through her tribal nation’s territory; and a ceremonial turtle rattle, used by tribes in special ceremonies.

“Cynthia fed me, I laid up on her couch, we carpooled to anti-racism trainings around the state,” Jeffries-Logan says, her eyes moist and a catch in her voice. “And when we did a ritual for my mother [who died from Alzheimer’s disease] in the ocean, Cynthia told me, since she had lost her parents at a young age and had to be like a mother to her younger siblings, she knew what it was like to be a motherless child. I was going to do whatever I could for her.”

She didn’t want her beloved sister-friend “scratching and clawing to stay here.” So she stroked the soles of Brown’s feet – which got cooler and cooler as death approached – not to bring back sensation, but to help untether her from this earth.

When Brown took her last breath, Burney-Scott’s and Jeffries-Logan’s hands were among those resting on her body. It was a fitting end: a social death for a community advocate who told her friends, “You continue to fight the good fight, and you have to promise me that you won’t leave anyone behind.”

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