Last Saturday I attended an excellent seminar on palliative care conducted by the Cognitive Institute (www.cognitiveinstitute.org) conducted on behalf of MIPS, a medical indemnity organisation which I belong to (www.mips.com.au).
The attendees were a mixture of general practitioners, specialists, hospital medical officers and medical educators, and the very open discussions between participants and the facilitator (who is an experienced GP) were very valuable.
It was very interesting to discuss the impact of culture on the approach to death. The human race has a 100% mortality rate, but we heard about a range of cultural approaches ranging from family shielding the patient from the knowledge of impending death to accepting death as a normal part of life. As in every other important area of life, preparation makes a difference- for the patient, for loved ones and for the health practitioners advising and providing care.
In contrast, just a few days previously, I had cause to reflect on how sudden and unexpected death can be.
On Thursday last week I was sitting at the kitchen table working when I became aware of the sound of a persistent helicopter buzzing overhead. Most commonly this occurs when there is a Police helicopter in the area (as I remember when I was living close to the Hoddle Street shootings many years ago), but when I went outside and looked it was a Channel 7 News helicopter. I therefore surmised that something significant must have happened in the immediate vicinity and started to find out what it might be. I started to search news sites on the Web, turned the TV on for news updates, and then turned on the ABC radio.
Normal radio programming was interrupted to bring the sobering news of a fatal fiery car crash in drizzy overcast conditions just a couple of hundred metres down the road. Three people (and perhaps a fourth) had been instantly incinerated with no hope of escape.
In these situations it is very much a case that, as poet John Donne once famously said, “no man is an island entire of itself”, and when it is something terrible that has happened in your local area, one feels an incredible need to understand what has happened and exactly where it has happened. It is not a form of ghoulish voyeurism, but rather a sense of being part of the local community and sharing in the shock and grief and sorrow for those who lost their lives and their families and friends.
So, I went for a walk in the light drizzle towards where I understood the accident to have happened. The Police had both distant and close roadblocks in place, and it was obvious that a lot of emergency responders were hard at work. I wasn’t interested in getting too close, but just to clarify the location where the accident had happened, and from the corner of a small nearby park could see the burnt out rear end of a car covered by a blue tarpaulin resting against a residential fence, diagonally opposite the suburban railway station. The Police said later that it was just a horrible freak accident where a chain of circumstances had culminated in the tragic outcome. If you have ever heard of the ‘Swiss Cheese Model’ which is used in human factors theory to explain how adverse events happen, then this was a perfect example. Just so profoundly sad!
It did make me slightly anxious about driving that evening in the same drizzly conditions, and the information that has been provided about the crash analysis goes to reinforce the point that in wet overcast conditions all drivers should slow down, drive carefully and not take any risks.
The Age Newspaper, 3 May 2012: http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/police-fear-fourth-body-20120503-1y0zs.html
The Age Newspaper, 4 May 2012: http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/fishtail-link-in-fiery-triplefatal-car-crash-20120504-1y2w7.html
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