HumaneMedicine

Patients: What Health Care Reform Forgot

by David Biro

All the interested parties [have been consulted] to help him find a solution to the health-care crisis: insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, doctors, lawyers.

But there was one notable absence: the patients, the group supposedly at the center of all these efforts. Wouldn't it make sense to solicit their input on improving the health-care system?

See full Op-Ed piece here: Download Biro Patients  .

Science Hero: Dame Cecily Saunders

Dame Cicely Saunders was an Englishwoman who had a huge impact on our world.  She founded the modern hospice and started a worldwide movement to provide compassionate care for the dying. A nurse, social worker and doctor, she established new methods of pain control and a multi-faceted, holistic approach to care giving. This led to the development of a new medical specialty, palliative care, and the contemporary hospice.

"We have to concern ourselves with the quality of life as well as its length," Dame Cicely, as she was known affectionately in England, declared. This pioneering woman opened the first modern hospice in a residential suburb of London in 1967. Today, St. Christopher’s Hospice welcomes around 4,000 visitors annually and more than 50,000 health care professionals from all over the world visit and train there.
 
Her philosophy was simple., “You matter because you are you, and you matter to the last moment of your life."  Read more about her here..