This program discusses care at the end of life, primarily focusing on pallative care of individuals and their families. The program's focus is on spiritual and supportive aspects of care rather than physical care. Information on the role and importance of advance care planning and advance directives is also presented.

"The first ever practical, compassionate, and comprehensive guide to dying--and living fully until you do. "There is nothing wrong with you for dying," palliative care doctor BJ Miller and Shoshana Berger write in A Beginner's Guide to the End. "Our ultimate purpose here isn't so much to help you die as it is to free up as much life as possible until you do." Theirs is a clear-eyed and big-hearted action plan for approaching the end of life, written...

This program discusses care at the end of life, primarily focusing on palliative care of individuals and their families.

Gawande, a practicing surgeon, addresses his profession's ultimate limitation, arguing that quality of life is the desired goal for patients and families of the terminally ill.

An advance care plan (ACP) is a legal document that you create to ensure that your wishes for your end of life are made clear and adhered to. An ACP is a good document to have whether you are sick or well. It becomes a crucial document once you are no longer able to express your wishes. In these 'Speaking from experience' video clips, people discuss their experiences of creating an Advance Care Plan, and the benefits of having one in place. They were...

"An exquisitely written, expertly reported memoir and expose; of modern medicine that leads the way to more humane, less invasive end-of-life care based on the author's acclaimed New York Times Magazine piece. This is the story of one daughter's struggle to allow her parents the peaceful, natural deaths they wanted and to investigate the larger forces in medicine that stood in the way. When doctors refused to disable the pacemaker that caused her...

Journalist Matt, his vibrant wife Nicole and their two young daughters, have their lives upended by Nicole's heartbreaking diagnosis of terminal cancer. As Matt's responsibilities as caretaker and parent become increasingly overwhelming, the couple's best friend Dane Faucheux offers to come and help out. As Dane puts his life on hold to stay with his friends, the impact of this life-altering decision proves greater and more profound than anyone could...

"In Dear Life, palliative care specialist Dr. Rachel Clarke recounts her professional and personal journey to understand not the end of life, but life at its end. Death was conspicuously absent during Rachel's medical training. Instead, her education focused entirely on learning to save lives, and was left wanting when it came to helping patients and their families face death. She came to specialize in palliative medicine because it is the one specialty...

How far would you go to sustain the life of someone you love or your own? When the moment comes, and you're confronted with the prospect of 'pulling the plug', do you know how you'll respond? Unfounded rumors of federal 'death panels' grabbed headlines last summer, but the real decisions of how we die, the questions that most of us prefer to put off, are being made quietly behind closed doors, increasingly on the floors of America's intensive care...

"After my son Kyle Ferriera van Leer declared his major in Egyptology at Yale in 2010, he mentioned the Book of Two Ways in passing. Without knowing a thing about it, I said, "That's a great title for a novel." It was only after he began to explain what it actually was that I realized what I needed to write about - the construct of time, and love, and life, and death"-- Dawn Edelstein is on a plane when she is told to prepare for a crash landing....