Letting Go:
how to plan for a good death

£12.99 GBP

Letting Go:
how to plan for a good death

Overview

Whatever your age, making key decisions about your medical care now can help you maintain your dignity and autonomy for as long as possible. In Letting Go, an expert explains why living well includes planning for life’s end.

Thanks to miraculous medical advances, we are now living longer and longer. But this means that many individuals are now faced with making complex medical decisions, for themselves and for others, in times of great stress. How far should doctors go when trying to prolong life? How can we decide what is ‘too far’ and ‘not far enough’?

Letting Go is an introduction to the kinds of decisions that we can all face in a medical crisis. It shows us how to start thinking about our end-of-life stage before we get there, and how to make an advanced care plan that will help people make decisions on our behalf.

Drawing on many years of experience as an intensive-care specialist, and writing with great insight and compassion, Dr Corke shows us all how we can do dying better.

Details

Format
Paperback
Size
210mm x 135mm
Extent
256 pages
ISBN
9781911344858
RRP
GBP£12.99
Pub date
12 July 2018
Other rights
NA — Consortium

Praise

‘A book to reflect on and contemplate as it has resonance for us as practitioners, human beings, and society as a whole.’

Dr Sarah Russell, Head of Research at Hospice UK

‘In crisp, clear prose Corke confronts the reader with the scenario most of us in Western society are likely to face after a period of declining health and function: ambulance, hospital, unconsciousness, no plan in place, family disagreements about treatment, escalation of medical intervention, and finally, our last days spent ‘‘connected to machines, cared for by strangers, and separated from family’’ … As a manual for how to avoid ending up in the ICU, in what one of Corke’s patients called ‘‘the bad bit at the end’’, Letting Go is a guide book for our age.’

Gail BellThe Saturday Age
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About the Author

Dr Charlie Corke (MB BS., BSc., MRCP(UK), FCICM) is one of Australia’s leading Intensive Care specialists and is currently President of the College of Intensive Care of Australia and New Zealand. He is the regional clinical lead for the Advance Care Planning program and is the originator of the MyValues approach to advance care planning (www.myvalues.org.au). Dr Corke lectures widely on medical communication and end-of-life decision-making, was featured on the ABC in the film In the End, and is a regular contributor to radio.
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