Check Up - Palliative Care

Barbara Myers takes listeners' calls on palliative care. She is joined by Dr Polly Edmonds, consultant in palliative care medicine at King's College Hospital in London to discuss how pain and symptom relief, spiritual and psycho-social support can improve the quality of life of people with life-threatening illnesses like cancer or heart disease. Broaching the subject of death and how and where people would like to end their life can be hard for both medical professionals and family and loved ones, but fear and ignorance can only make things harder to deal with when the end is imminent.