MEDIA CENTRE

Challenges and opportunities in a modern landscape It’s time for a difficult conversation. We are good at that aren’t we? This was a challenging piece to write and I imagine it will be challenging to read. Challenge isn’t always bad, it is hard, but good things can come from hard conversations. After all, the role of the End Of Life (EOL) Doula is a challenging one and we tend to operate in the space of things that are layered and complex and hard. Talk to anyone who has done the work of an EOL doula authentically for any length of time, and they will tell you it is the hardest and best, most exhausting and rewarding work they have done. People come to the role of EOL doula

What are the policy considerations for integrating medical and social care to transform the way we care for older Australians at the end of life?

When was the last time you really listened…? That might seem like a silly question, it’s not often we think about the sense of hearing but if you8 are a person who can hear you use it every day… but are you listening? We hear a lot of stuff all the time. We have so much background noise in our lives for so much of the time that when we go places like the outback, we get astounded by the true silence. Some of that background noise is made up of hundreds of inane conversations we have every week, the majority of which we will never remember. They are the background noise of our social relationships. But when a person feels like they have not been heard, that

What comes with age? There’s lots of things people say come with age, things like wisdom, patience, tolerance, respect – things that we seem to spend a lifetime learning and acquiring. But there are other things that happen with age as well and often that culminates in developing a sense of what truly matters to us in life. We define what it is that we value the most. I’d like to tell you a story about a lady and we’re going to call her Maggie. I met Maggie when she was having a real struggle in life. She had had an accident; she had been near death and spent months in a hospital. She had no family to speak of and being in her 80’s she was declining

I have been thinking a lot about my grandparents of late. Before my mum died she asked me to make sure that my grandmothers ashes got placed where she had wanted them to be, with her husband, my grandfather. I had my grandmother for 40 years of my life, most of that we lived together in various ways, and I adored her. Grandad died when I was much younger and his death was one of the most traumatic deaths I have known. Back in the 1980’s ashes urns were not buried as a standard practice, the ashes were at times dug into the earth under the monument. It didn’t feel right then when the cemetery offered to have Nanas ashes put in the urn in the ground then,