Thursdays@3 by Palliative Care Australia
Stagione 1
"You only die once so make it a good one" - Prof Samar Aoun
In conversation with the NSW Senior Australian of the Year 2023
Better access to palliative care: worth voting for!
di Palliative Care Australia
Samar advocates for a person-centred approach to the end of life. She focuses on under-served groups such as those with motor neurone disease (MND) and dementia, people who are terminally ill and live alone, and those caring for a loved one. Samar is the Perron Institute Research Chair in Palliative Care at the University of Western Australia and an Adjunct Professor at La Trobe University. She co-founded the South West Compassionate Communities Network in 2018 and leads the Compassionate Connectors Program. Her work mobilises and equips people to better support those living with a life limiting illness and those who are grieving. In this conversation, we learn about the spark that started Samar’s passion for palliative care and reflect on her own Australian story as a migrant from Lebanon. As Samar says, “you only die once so make it a good one”.
Former nurse Teresa Plane is recognised as a pioneer of modern palliative care in Australia. Having studied palliative care models of care around the globe, Teresa opened a hospice and palliative care unit at Mt Carmel Hospital in Western Sydney in 1978. She also launched a home care program, supported by a charity she’d established to advocate on behalf of the dying. She also has a long history of sharing her knowledge through international forums, universities, and national conferences. Teresa continues advocating and volunteering as she approaches 90 years, and in this conversation reflects on what she has learnt about life and death along the way. You are in the presence of greatness as you click play; prepare to go on a journey.
Palliative Care Australia and our members are making access to palliative care an election issue! Yep - we are competing with some other big issues for attention, but few issues will touch every family the way access to palliative care does. Jean Kittson, one of Australia's most loved performers shares her family's trauma in trying to access palliative care as a way of raising awareness. Hit play to listen to Jean's deeply personal story. To find out more, visit our federal election campaign website.
In May 2024, Palliative Care Australia launched the National Palliative Care Week Lecture - a tradition we’re wanting to grow each year in and around National Palliative Care Week where we invite a distinguished member of the palliative care community to challenge our thinking and our work. We’re off to a strong start in 2024. The demographics of living, dying and caring are evolving rapidly. With that comes a clear and pressing challenge to the care economy. Professor David Currow believes government, health services and the community all have a role to play in meeting our future care needs - but are they ready? In the inaugural National Palliative Care Week Lecture, at Parliament House, Canberra, Prof Currow explains: "Our health services today are playing catch-up." "Our health services are actually geared to the middle of the 20th Century. Not the beginning of the 21st Century. "We need to confront a very different vitality and therefore a very different mortality. Our social services, our health services, have really not come to grips with that." Prof Currow is a physician by training, he’s a widely published academic and researcher. He’s previously been the New South Wales Chief Cancer Officer, Chief Executive Officer of the Cancer Institute of New South Wales and was the Foundation Chief Executive Officer of Cancer Australia. He is currently the Deputy Vice Chancellor of Research and Sustainable Futures at the University of Wollongong in New South Wales.