Grief: The shadow pandemic

Jonathan Koffman is Reader in Palliative Care at the Cicely Saunders Institute, King’s College London. He was instrumental in setting up and running the long established inter-professional MSc in Palliative Care. His research interests include social disadvantaged and end of life care, clinical uncertainty, developing and evaluating complex palliative care interventions, grief and bereavement outcomes and advance care planning, particularly for those with non-malignant disease. His Orchid details can be found here.

Dr Lucy Selman is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Bristol, where she co-leads the Palliative and End of Life Care Research Group. Lucy is a social scientist with research interests in psychosocial, spiritual and cultural aspects of serious illness and care. Recently her work has focused on communication, care planning, treatment decision-making and grief and bereavement. She is currently conducting a National Institute of Health Research Advanced Fellowship on staff-patient communication in advanced kidney disease. She is also the founding director of Good Grief, a online festival taking place in October 2020.

Before going to medical school, Dr Rachel Clarke was a television journalist and documentary maker. She now specialises in palliative medicine, caring deeply about helping patients live the end of their lives as fully and richly as possible – and in the power of human stories to build empathy and inspire change. Her first book, the Sunday Times bestselling Your Life in My Hands, revealed what life is like for a junior doctor on the NHS frontline. Her new memoir, Dear Life is based on her work in a hospice and explores love, loss, grief, dying and what really matters at the end of life.