Palliative Care Week: Issues we all need to discuss

IT IS, of course, easy to make confident, if not over-confident statements around end-of-life issues if you imagine that the prospect of your own mortality lurks below some distant horizon, but none of us can avoid these issues forever.

A loved one’s slow, dignity-sapping illness, leading to an inevitable death, concentrates the mind and makes the consideration of these heartbreaking issues another challenge at a very challenging time of life.

This is Palliative Care Week, an event organised by the All-Ireland Institute of Hospice and Palliative Care to raise awareness of the questions around these issues and the ever-changing medical and ethical landscape they stand in.

The event is also designed to give a full understanding of the reach, sometimes stretching over years, of palliative care, which can involve a person’s psychological, social, and spiritual needs, and extending support to families after a loved one has died.

Some brave people have decided that they will not allow an illness to make the final decision for them, and died in jurisdictions where an assisted death is not illegal, as it is here.

Though our courts have been forced to consider that issue, it is likely that any constitutional change on it is several horizons distant. Nevertheless, we all owe it to ourselves and especially our loved ones to reach an understanding of how — not if — these questions might be resolved when fate decrees.