Further to education, one of the frustrations we also have is that there are patients who obviously need palliative care, their care providers know this, but for many patients and their families, there's a misunderstanding of what palliative care means. All they understand about palliative care is that they're giving up. As Mr. Davies so eloquently said, we are a death-denying society. We are.
I have had patients come in and they're not plugged into palliative care when they obviously should be, and it's at an hour when I can get hold of their primary care provider, who tells me, “I've been talking until I'm blue in the face; they won't accept palliative care because they think it's giving up.”
This is even more of an issue in patients who are a different cultural group, a different diaspora, or recent immigrants who are having trouble understanding so much of our society. They think that everyone is just giving up on them, but they don't want to give up.
Should there also be a push to educate the general public about this, so that people generally have this on their radar before any diagnosis even comes up, before they even think that they need it, so that they have some idea of what this is and what it can provide?