Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
There's good and bad practice around things such as breaking bad news
or supporting people after death,
after someone has died.
So the course is very clear about the skills that it wants students
to be taught.
We use video footage of real examples of actually breaking bad news.
We have scenes that have been taken from St Christopher's Hospice
where we're using, what I would call a groundbreaking approach
to teaching the skills of communication
which is not about traditional skills
that you can get on a counselling course.
It's much more about the practical, everyday support that people need
and using the skills to make a significant difference
at the end of people's lives.
What the course also highlights is the value of support
that people can gain from community, being in communities together
and actually supporting each other.
There are illustrations within the course about school bereavements
about communities, such as the unfirm community,
where people support each other.
And also challenges notions
about support groups that are set up for children.
We actually show an example of a children's support group.
The celebrity group is really interesting.
It raises a lot of questions
about how people can grieve for someone they don't know.
And we look at some of the theories around this.
One particular perspective would be that in the cult of the celebrity
that people do have a relationship with some idealised person
and that this is an area in which they can express grief
more easily and more safely in some sort of community of fellow grievers.
And these communities can be quite large, celebrities.
Other people would argue that this is standing in for having to face grief
at a more personal level.
We look at examples of current dilemmas
that seem to be very much in the news at the moment.
One of which is assisted suicide.
The way in which definitions of death have changed
is connected in part, some would argue in a large part,
to organ donation, the need to harvest organs from someone
who is still breathing but actually whose brain has died.
So a lot of really difficult, contentious debates on the course.
What is central to this final block of study
are two dilemmas.
The first dilemma is about the 'do not resuscitate' order
on someone in an accident and emergency department,
someone who didn' t want to be resuscitated,
whether or not this person had the right to request that.
The second dilemma that the course looks at
is whether or not children have the right to be told when they're dying.