A subscription to the Guardian Weekly changed my life. In the issue of 22 February 1978, I read an article by Victor and Rosemary Zorza describing the death from cancer of their daughter, Jane, in an English hospice. The article had an enormous impact on the fledgling hospice movement. It moved and inspired me. I was particularly impressed by how the loving care that Jane had received sustained her courage and enabled her to support her parents through their own grief.
There was no equivalent care for the dying in the new university hospital where I held a physician appointment; dying patients were a disappointment and an embarrassment. Curtains were closed: “nothing further to be done here”.
I took the article to the hospital administrator, asking his support to establish a hospice ward. But all space in the hospital was earmarked.
With sympathetic colleagues from nursing and community care, I embarked on further advocacy. We researched the unmet needs of dying patients in our region. They were many. A modest community programme won wide public support. Eventually, South Australia’s minister for health helped fund a chair in palliative care at Flinders University, in Adelaide.
My appointment, in 1988, as the world’s first professor of palliative care, had its origins in the Guardian Weekly.
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