VP-NET Vulnerable Persons and End of Life New Emerging Team
Skip Navigation VP-NET Vulnerable Persons and End of Life New Emerging Team

Disability and Palliative Care: What can we learn from one another?

This section of the VP-Net Website will be used to illustrate how our multidisciplinary research can inform and transform two somewhat disparate communities’ views of palliative and end of life care by illustrating what we can learn from one another.

Change in the existing system toward the ideal of palliative care at its life-affirming best requires partnership between physicians and people with disabilities. 42 John Seely discussed the role people with disabilities can play in helping recently disabled persons at the end of life learn to cope with change along with the education of people working in palliative care on how to support these people at VP Net’s 2006 Spring Institute.

The disability community has a tremendous amount to teach us about how to help people cope with what seems like a tragic situation. And for many, losses of control really do seem to make life no longer worth while. So I think the disability community has something to teach those of us who work in palliative care about how we can help patients find hope and meaning in the face of those losses of control that they’re experiencing so they don’t give up.

Disability and Palliative Care Sections:

[ Top ]