Young adults who go into medicine with ideals of curing and caring are unlikely to be any more comfortable talking about death than the rest of society
Young adults who go into medicine with ideals of fixing, curing and caring, are unlikely to be any more comfortable talking about death than the rest of society. But their choice of career will mean being confronted with death and bereavement more often than most, so the sooner they start speaking about it the better — for their own sakes as well as the patients and families they will be working with.
“The students walked in the front door of the mortuary as a bereaved member of a family might, so it is that experience of putting yourself in somebody else’s shoes,” says Clarke, who lectures in health informatics but has also completed a masters in loss and bereavement, a programme which the RCSI runs in conjunction with the Irish Hospice Foundation .
While there tends to be a focus on a doctor’s role in “breaking bad news”, he says, their work with the dying and the bereaved is much wider than that. “Sitting with or talking to somebody about their wishes is not breaking bad news. Or indeed sitting chatting in a GP surgery with somebody whose husband died six weeks ago is not breaking bad news.”
“One of the things that really stood out for me was conversations around culture,” she says. The diversity of students who attend RCSI enabled comparisons about how death is handled in different cultures. This was another valuable aspect for students who could end up working anywhere in the world and with patients of different cultural backgrounds to their own.
Gipson wishes she had more exposure to this topic earlier on in her studies. Currently, the level of preparedness among medical students for death and bereavement depends more on personal exposure, she believes, than what is covered in their training. Her grandfather died in the past year and through that process, she talked with her grandmother about palliative care, a specialisation she has had a strong interest in ever since high school in Toronto.
“What I liked about this week was that each day we were faced with something new and unexpected.” Perhaps surprisingly, the visit to the morgue at Beaumont Hospital was something of a highlight for her. “It didn’t look like what I thought and was better than I expected.” “It really helped us understand how we need to control our emotions, so it doesn’t cloud our work or our decision-making. But it also made us feel we can’t just be all mechanical and we need to understand what the family are going through and to be supportive.”Nowf Alshammari: 'I found myself connecting with my peers in a very different but positive way.'
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