National Palliative Care Awareness Week
This week is National Palliative Care Awareness Week in Australia.
I have been involved in awareness week activities for some years now and every year it gets more difficult to get people to engage with the concept.
Palliative Care is really hard to sell from a PR perspective as generally people don’t want to know about it until they need it and by then they are needing personal support and really don’t care too much about what other people are thinking or feeling.
Palliative care isn’t ’sexy’…………….’hip’ people don’t take on the role of patrons for palliative care as they do for cancer or diabetes………….palliative care really is the ‘poor relation’ on the PR front.
When someone is told that their illness is terminal………….they won’t get better……in fact they will die well before they had anticipated…………….the shock and distress is immeasurable.
In order for people to know where to get help and support, we need to raise community awareness about palliative care so that everyone in our community knows that help is available and how to access it.
We need to talk about death. We need to educate our kids and families. We need to be supportive to people in our communities who are suffering from illness or the grief of a recent significant death.
So I’m NOT asking you to volunteer to work with dying people or to sacrifice part of your salary to a palliative care service……….what i’m asking of you is simple…………………..have ONE conversation about death or grief this week. Talk to a friend about organ donation. Ask a colleague if they have ever had a family member cared for by a palliative care team. Ask your siblings or your kids if they know what palliative care is.
If YOU don’t know much about palliative care……………..educate yourself this week. Scroll back to some of the past Dead Serious episodes and listen to the ones that focus on palliative care……………do a ‘google’ search and read an article or two……………..buy a book that deals with end of life issues………………give some thought to how YOU feel about death and dying.
Be part of the solution………………HELP RAISE PALLIATIVE CARE AWARENESS THIS WEEK.