Diane E. Meier, MD

Meet Dr. Meier, a leader in the non-hospice palliative care movement. She is currently the director of the Center to Advance Palliative Care (CAPC).

” … The CAPC provides health care professionals with the tools, training and technical assistance necessary to start and sustain successful palliative care programs in hospitals and other health care settings. CAPC is a national organization dedicated to increasing the availability of quality palliative care services for people facing serious illness …”

The Story of Dr. Balfour Mount

Dr. Balfour Mount is to the palliative care movement what Dame Cecily Saunders is to the hospice movement. Of course Saunders came first and introduced Mount to the new philosophy of caring for the dying in 1973; but, it is Mount who is the father of palliative care in the hospital setting. He coined the term ‘palliative’ and it was he who first brought this type of care into a large university teaching hospital, the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

“What has surprised me is how little palliative care has to do with death. The death part is almost irrelevant. Our focus isn’t on dying. Our focus is on quality of living.” —Mount.

I’m sending you to a couple of places to read about him. His influence and dedication is the very beginning of the hospital-based, pre-hospice palliative care movement that has been picking up speed in the last several years.

A Moral Force: the story of Dr. Balfour Mount

McGill University, Whole Person Care

Interview with Khris Ford

In January 2008, I interviewed Khris Ford, Licensed Professional Counselor and founder of My Healing Place in Austin, Texas. She is an adjunct instructor at the University of Texas at Austin School of Social Work, where she teaches graduate level courses in grief and loss counseling. She is also a bereaved parent, and it is her personal experience of transformative grief following the death of her son, Stephen, in 1989 that fuels her passion for work in the field of grief, loss, and trauma.

Khris, what got you into the work you are doing?

I think what got me into the work, really, is a lifetime of life losses. I lost siblings as a child, my father abandoned us and I grew up curious about the fact that I saw some people around me who were dealing with these losses in ways that clearly made them more, and other people around me who were dealing with them and they were diminished. I was pretty curious about that as my life was going on; I wondered why that was. Some people seem to be challenged and grow out of the experience and others were paralyzed. I certainly didn’t verbalize that as a kid but I did grow up curious about death, grief and about loss.

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