Offering comfort, not cure: the palliative care specialist

“Contrary to what people may think, working in a hospice doesn’t mean we all go around with long faces. We’re serious when we need to be serious, but there’s a lot of laughter and fun from patients, their families, and the staff,” says associate specialist Alison Phippen. “It’s not a grim place, there’s a lot of normal life going on,”The specialist in palliative care at St Ann’s Hospice, Manchester, was drawn to her career when she was helped by a Macmillan nurse as a junior doctor. “I was so impressed by her. There weren’t many Macmillan nurses around back then but she knew exactly what to do and what to say to a young patient who was having seizures from their secondary malignancy,” Phippen says. “We also had staff come in from a local hospice to help people with intractable symptoms and so I decided to work for six months…
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