If you haven’t come across these, you might be interested in some end-of-life podcasts from the University of Buffalo School of Social Work. There’s an interview with Jean Kutner, a medical professor from somewhere else, on the development of evidence-based practice in American hospice practice; this is really just an average trawl through why it’s good to get evidence on your practice (which is frankly a bit dull) but towards the end, she’s good on how you facilitate research in your hospice.

The real gems are three talks from one of their own faculty members, Deborah Waldrop, talking about her own research on end-of-life care decision-making. She has a really engaging manner, and is easy to listen to (unlike Dr Kutner). The first one explains ‘what is hospice?’, tells you about American hospice care and has a bit of history, which includes St Christopher’s and Dame Cicely. This is less than 15 minutes, so it packs a lot in, but she makes it really interesting, explaining also doing personally relevant research.

The later episodes are about her research: how did people make decisions on their pathway through hospice services?  Episode two explains some of the issues in doing research with people who are dying. You get the results in the longer (but still less than 15 minutes) episode 3, with some nice quotations from patients and carers about some of their dilemmas in deciding on their pathway through end of life care serviecs.

I expect many of my readers are not used to podcasts. How do you get these? First, you go to the website; click on the link below. It gives you a list of their many podcasts. Click in the search box (top right-hand corner) and type in ‘end of life’. This gets you a list. Choose the one you want and click on ‘download MP3′. You get a rectangle which has a slider on it showing where they are as it plays the podcast. It will start off saying ‘buffering’, while it downloads enough, and the rectangle fills as more of it downloads, usually it keeps ahead of the slider, but if not it will stop for a bit until more arrives at your computer. When it’s ready your media player (probably Windows) will open and start playing it – the rectangle becomes a narrow line at the bottom, but the slider continues its way along as it plays. Each of the podcasts has some music and an intro. Once you’ve heard this, you won’t want it again; you can click and hold your cursor on the slider to move it to the right along the rectangle or line until you get to what you want to hear about; you can also slide it back to hear stuff again. It will carry on to the end (which is always an ad for the Buffalo School of Social Work – look at the website, it’s one of the historic schools in the US), and you can leave it running in the background and do other stuff on your computer while listening to it.

The website: http://www.socialwork.buffalo.edu/podcast/