A Better Ending: A Civic Model for Ageing and Dying

With Dr BJ Miller   Friday 7 October

Podcast available HERE

Dr. BJ Miller is a hospice & palliative medicine physician.  He sees patients and families at the University California San Francisco (UCSF) Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, where he also teaches and serves on faculty.  In addition, he serves as Advisor for Zen Hospice Project, a residential hospice facility and education centre in San Francisco which he directed from 2011 through 2015. Dr. Miller also consults at the intersection of palliative care and design and frequently speaks publicly on this topic. He and his co-author, Shoshana Berger, are currently writing a practical manual for preparing for death that will be a highly practical and provocative guide to navigating dying in contemporary American society.     

His interests are in working across disciplines to affect broad-based culture change and in cultivating a civic model for ageing and dying. This includes the creation of a Research Centre that will foster change outside the confines of modern medicine as well as grow a mobile palliative care team and promote public art projects within communities as a means to memorialise and provoke discussion around the topic of death.
   
His 2015 TED Talk: “Not Whether But How” (aka “What Matters Most at the End of Life”), a reflection of his vision to make empathic palliative care available to all, ranked among the Top 15 Most Viewed Talks of the year and he continues to speak internationally on the topics of perspective making, aesthetics, and palliative care.           
 
Dr. BJ Miller invites us to think about and discuss the end of our lives through the lens of a mindful, human-centred model of care, one that embraces dying not as a medical event but rather as a universally shared life experience. Informed by his own experiences as a patient, Dr. Miller powerfully advocates the roles of our senses, community and presence in designing a better ending. 
 
BJ brings a unique blend of training, experience and commitment to furthering the message that suffering and dying are fundamental and intrinsic aspects of life and is widely recognized for his efforts in cultivating a larger dialogue about this universal human experience.
 
Following undergraduate studies in art history at Princeton, BJ received his MD from University of California San Francisco as a Regents' Scholar and completed his internal medicine residency at Cottage Hospital in Santa Barbara, California, where he served as chief resident. He completed a fellowship in hospice and palliative medicine at Harvard Medical School, with clinical duties split between Massachusetts General Hospital and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

BJ Miller
My Project: BJ Miller’s Zen Hospice Project
BJ Miller, Pain Doctor at the Zen Hospice Project  
Twitter: @zenhospice 
TED talk:  Not Whether But How

Presented by The Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Centre and Palliative Care South Australia

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