The word Hospice has gone out of fashion in many places but the best human care I have ever seen and participated in, in Palliative Care, have been in Hospices. The worst care I have ever seen has been in Units where Palliative Care is co-joined to Oncology Services.
I really have never seen such human suffering in all my life more than is in Oncology Units pretending they are doing end of life Palliative Care. I find this to be one of the most disgraceful misrepresentations of human care I have ever seen, and it happens on a daily basis because the Mind-set, the curative, life-extending mindset of Oncology Services really never knows when enough is enough until someone is in the ground.
I'm sure, if they could, Oncological Services would develop radiation treatment via jump-start-leads into graves... if they could...and call it Palliative Radiation......or have vials of mustard gas poured into the trenches.
Oncology Services in Australia are presently trying very hard to re-name Palliative care as Supportive Care basically so they can have access to the money to irradiate and poison even more people up to the day they die.
The more end-of-life care is moving towards the Hospice ideal, the better it gets for the patient, family and staff. The more it moves towards streamlined integration with curative and chronic health services, the worse the care gets.
Thirty years working in palliative care and only a few really horrific stories to tell, and all related to far too much surgery, radiation, and chemical poisoning of some very nice and pleasant and easy-going good people whose only real illness, apart from some nasty cancers, were that they were privately insured and trusted their Oncologists implicitly.
True. Fact. No doubt about that.
It is often said that no one goes to work in the Health Services with the idea of actively hurting people, and this is quite often the case; but there are times and people who do hurt and punish the most vulnerable quite purposefully. I've seen this happen in hospitals, less often in palliative care units, and hardly ever in hospices, but it does happen; not everyone is a decent human being at all, no matter what their skills and qualifications. We need to keep our wits about us as to whom to trust in every aspect of life.
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