It’s often the case that however much we think we might know something we only really truly know it when it happens to us. And it was only when my dad was diagnosed with terminal cancer, that I got to know the true value of hospice care.
His wish was that he could die at home, and so my brother and I moved in with him and did our best to care for him. But we could not have done this without the incredible hospice at home nursing team from St Michaels Hospice who visited and helped us find our way through those last short weeks of his life.
It's a chapter that has left me thinking more deeply about care and caring when we are dying – who does the caring, who doesn’t and at what cost. Both self-employed for many years, my brother and I were able to reorganise our diaries and workloads to be resumed at a time when dad would no longer need us.
If I’ve made it sound like it was easy, it wasn’t. There are few things harder than caring for someone you love who is dying. But am I glad that I did? Yes. And I’d do it again in the blink of an eye. But working people, who aren’t self-employed too often find that their employer is less than understanding when either they or someone they love receives the news that no one wants to hear.
And that’s why, in my other role as editor of BACP Workplace, it felt important to feature a special article for Dying Matters Awareness Week, which is held this week focussing on how a compassionate employer responds when an employee is facing a terminal diagnosis or caring for someone who is.
Death and dying at work, is written by Faith Holloway from Hospice UK, who I had the pleasure of meeting at the Health and Wellbeing at Work Conference at the NEC in March earlier this year. Faith spoke about the Compassionate Employers programme, run by Hospice UK, which offers training and support to employers to help them be kinder and better equipped to talk to an employee who has just received the news of a terminal diagnosis.
While people might not remember what we said, or what we did, they will always remember how we made them feel.
The key message is that employers – large and small – need to get prepared, because, if it hasn’t happened yet – it probably will. Fewer than 5% of organisations have a terminal diagnosis illness policy in place, so when an employee is still reeling from a diagnosis, it’s shocking how often employers respond with a lack of compassion, confusing messages or even decide that it’s a good idea to put the employee on a performance review for having cancer. I know, it’s hard to believe.
While highlighting both the legal and financial implications for employers, Faith argues that there’s a moral and ethical case too. Compassion and competence go a long way when working with an employee facing an early death, and the way in which an employer responds, kindly or otherwise, will be remembered for years to come by family, friends and community – it becomes part of the organisation’s legacy.
This was a message that was loud and clear when I dropped in to a pop-up Death Café held locally at Longfield Hospice as part of Dying Matters Awareness Week attended by many of their lovely staff, among others for tea, cake and conversations about death and dying. While people might not remember what we said, or what we did, they will always remember how we made them feel. And that’s what stays with me about our brief encounter with the hospice at home nursing team – what matters is the way they left our family feeling – it’s a feeling that has endured and it’s both precious and priceless.
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