Death’s worsening taboo: is hampering the provision of high quality palliative care

A reasonable mission statement for any health professional is that we strive to improve the quality and length of our patients’ lives; nonetheless, death remains the inevitable end of that journey. In an age of unprecedented openness and access to information, where everything from sex to mental illness is discussed with candour unthinkable to our forbears, my personal experience is that the societal taboo around death has worsened. Furthermore, the medical profession has colluded with this, with the end result being a disservice to the dying and their families. The Liverpool Care Pathway was introduced with the hope of bringing hospice-level palliative care to all clinical settings. Following a recent independent review,1 it was brusquely dropped, yet …