Ken Hillman

This gripping collection of stories about the experiences of intensive care patients, their families and carers, is about ordinary people facing terrible tragedies and the ways they cope with them. The author, an experienced intensive care clinician, takes the reader on a journey inside an intensive care unit and reveals to the public, for the first time, what really happens inside ICU. The book traces the personal experiences of ICU patients and their families and the struggles of staff providing care in this critical environment. It also offers a searing critique of the way modern healthcare can fail those in greatest need.… (lisätietoja)

A professor of intensive care asks why so many elderly people linger in pain and confusion in ICU when all they want is to die at home in peace and with their loved ones. A crucial and timely rallying cry against unnecessary suffering and for humanity and gentle acceptance at the end of our lives.

A huge majority of people at the end of their lives want to die at home, but only a small number manage to do this. This vital book asks why.

Many of us have experienced an elderly loved one coming to the end of their life in a hospital - over-treated, infantilised and, worst of all, facing a death without dignity. Families are being herded into making decisions that are not to the benefit of the patient.

Professor Ken Hillman has worked in intensive care since its inception. But he is appalled by the way the ICU has become a place where the frail, soon-to-die and dying are given unnecessary operations and life-prolonging treatments without their wishes being taken into account.

A Good Life to the End will embolden and equip us to ask about the options that doctors in hospital should offer us but mostly don't. It lets us know that there are other, gentler options for patients and their loved ones that can be much more sympathetic to the final wishes of most people facing the end of their lives.

An invaluable support for the elderly as well as their families, and a rallying cry for anyone who's had to witness the unnecessary suffering of a loved one, A Good Life to the End will spark debate, challenge the status quo and change lives.… (lisätietoja)

A Good Life to the End has to be one of the most depressing books I’ve read this year, but it’s an important one that faces up to some unpleasant facts.

Although I think it deserves a wider audience, I think the book will have most resonance for those of us confronting the end of life for aged parents, who are having to make decisions for loved ones no longer able to make those decisions for themselves, and who are realising that the same issues apply to us as we ourselves get older.

Professor Ken Hillman is Professor of Intensive Care at the University of New South Wales (SWS Clinical School), and an actively practising clinician in Intensive Care, at Liverpool Hospital. He’s also the presenter of the TED talk ‘We’re doing dying all wrong’, though I didn’t see that till I Googled his profile for this review.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/08/26/a-good-life-to-the-end-by-ken-hillman/… (lisätietoja)