A Good Death

In Dundedin Hospital staff are working to improve end of life treatment in pateints with COPD and other chronic conditions. Professor Robin Taylor wants to change the way that we care for people with long-term, but inevitably fatal medical conditions as they reach the end of their lives. Instead of writing another academic paper, he decided to take a completely different tack and commission a film about the issues.

"We wanted to make this film because we realised that the care we were providing to patients with respiratory deisease at the end of life was missing the mark, and I don't think we are alone. Two families expressed their appreciation but also their frustration at the way their loved one had been loved after in Dundein Hospital, and so we began to change the way we do things. We are now much more attentive to the issue of 'dying well', and we are still working at it. We believe that good end of life care is worth striving for. This film tells the story of one pateint and his family." Professor D Robin Taylor.