About Empathy About Empathy

Dr. Maxxine Rattner is a hospice/palliative care clinician and educator. It was her own experiences as a front-line hospice social worker that inspired her to begin researching and writing about non-physical suffering. Her work seeks to create more space within palliative care literature and practice for the harder parts of living with, and dying from, a life-limiting illness. She recently completed her PhD on this topic, entitled, “Disrupting and expanding the discourse: Palliative care clinicians’ experiences with patients’ non-physical suffering”.

In this episode, we discuss the challenges in addressing non-physical suffering and the importance of making space within palliative care to do this intrinsically difficult work and approach the work without the expectation of “fixing” a patient’s or family’s suffering.

Resource links:
Increasing our understanding of nonphysical suffering within palliative care: A scoping review
August 2021
Palliative and Supportive Care 20(3):1-16
DOI:10.1017/S1478951521001127
Authors:
Maxxine Rattner

Dr. Zhimeng Jia joined the Temmy Latner Centre for Palliative Care in Toronto as a clinician-investigator in September of 2021. Prior to joining the Toronto Palliative Care community, Dr. Jia completed his Family Medicine residency and Palliative Care clinical fellowship at the University of Alberta, and a research fellowship at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

Through a combination of personal and clinical experiences, Dr. Jia developed an interest in health inequities that Asian immigrants experience at the end-of-life. He refined these academic interests into a formal research program during his research fellowship in Boston. Now, he leads several institutionally, nationally, and internationally funded initiatives to understand the model of palliative care delivery among Asian Canadians, linguistic and paralinguistic elements of intercultural palliative care communication, and culturally-tailored palliative care training in Asia.

Dr. David Lysecki is the Founder and Medical Director of the Quality of Life & Advanced Care Program at McMaster Children's Hospital. Under his leadership the program has grown over the course of 7 years and the team’s ultimate goal is to establish a pediatric hospice in Hamilton. They are successfully moving this vision forward, having facilitated a partnership between Hamilton Health Sciences and the Dr. Bob Kemp Hospice Organization. He is the Division Head and an Associate Professor in the Division of Pediatric Palliative Medicine in the Department of Pediatrics at McMaster University. He has dual training in both pediatric oncology and palliative care.

In this episode, Dr. Lysecki discusses his experience working in pediatric palliative care, and how he navigates both the rewards and challenges of working in this area. We also discuss how we can ensure that palliative care and pediatric palliative care become the work of all health care providers.

Resource links:
Dr. Lysecki and his team are raising funds to build a pediatric hospice to support the McMaster Children's Hospital and its catchment area. To learn more or to support their work visit: https://keatonshouse.org/

Children Need Hospice Care Too: https://www.thespec.com/opinion/contributors/2020/10/13/children-need-hospice-palliative-care-too.html?rf

https://www.hamiltonhealthsciences.ca/share/more-than-a-village/

https://www.thespec.com/local-dundas/news/2023/01/24/dundas-vacant-city-property-reviewed-for-children-s-hospice.html

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