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.