Since this 2012, I haven’t seen a lot about “The Conversation Project” in the popular press. But now they are in the news again. For the last several months, the Boston-based non-profit, The Conversation Project, has been expanding its public engagement campaign through a TED talk in Boston (October 2, 2014), working with TV script writers to get end-of-life conversations inserted into TV shows, organizing “Death over Dinner” parties, conducting a Twitter chat (Thurs, April 2nd, 1-2pm eastern), etc.
There was also a 10-minute segment yesterday on the PBS Newshour about having end-of-life conversations with family and loved ones. See:
www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/new-movement-urges-scary-conversations-death-among-friends-family/
For me, the most interesting aspects of the Newshour segment were:
* Medicare is considering whether it should cover doctor-patient conversations about end-of-life care. During the Obamacare debates, some called such conversations “pulling the plug on grandma.” A palliative care MD interviewed in the Newshour segment said:
“It is exactly the opposite. It is about grandma controlling the plug. Grandma or her designee controls the plug and that’s the system we’re going to have. … The full range of the choices. From ‘Keep me alive, no matter what, as long as medicine can do that,’ to ‘I just want to be home with my family, with hospice,’ to anything in between or any sequence.”
* The idea that conversations with our loved ones need to go beyond “pull the plug” statements. The founder of the non-profit, Ellen Goodman, talked about her mother:
“From time to time if we were together my mother would say, ‘I never want to be like that. Pull the plug.’ You know. A lot of people say that. Well, there’s generally no plug to pull. … [Later on, my] mother could really no longer decide what she wanted for lunch, let alone what she wanted for health care decisions. [One] day when I got a call on the phone…the doctor said to me, ‘Your mother has another bout of pneumonia. Do you want her to have antibiotics?’ …[It] was quite shocking to me that those decisions fell to me. I’d just never thought about it before.”
If you don’t want to watch the 10-minute segment, there’s also a transcript available on the same webpage.
Robin