Alison was speaking at the Compassionate Communities in Palliative and End of Life Care Conference in Newry, Northern Ireland on 09/09/2024, organised by the All Ireland Institute of Hospice and Palliative Care, where she had the privilege of meeting Professor Allan Kellehear who was also speaking, and was the inspiration for Compassionate Inverclyde.
Compassionate Cities are communities that recognize that all natural cycles of sickness and health, birth and death, and love and loss occur every day within the orbits of its institutions and regular activities. A compassionate city is a community that recognizes that care for one another at times of crisis and loss is not simply a task solely for health and social services but is everyone’s responsibility.
Compassionate Cities are communities that publicly encourage, facilitate, supports and celebrates care for one another during life’s most testing moments and experiences, especially those pertaining to life-threatening and life-limiting illness, chronic disability, frail ageing and dementia, grief and bereavement, and the trials and burdens of long term care.
The pioneer of the Compassionate Communities approaches, Professor Kellehear, identified the 95% rule. “A person living at home with a life-limiting illness may come into contact with statutory services up to 5% of any day. He asks the question, ‘as a community, what can we do to occupy that 95%?”
In western societies, death has increasingly become medicalised and crucial knowledge and skills at a community level have steadily declined. Compassionate Communities supports the idea of spreading a concept known as death literacy – which is practical know-how about what to do and where to find support in a palliative or end of life care context.
The project evaluated a method to mobilise community assets, harness and connect inherent skills and resources that already exist at a neighbourhood level, to improve experiences for people experiencing life-limiting illness, loss, or grief.
