Yesterday, I was at the home of an Indian friend. After telling him about what I am doing (studying Palliative Care, offering advance care planning consultations, facilitating DeathCafe, etc.), I asked him if he’d heard of palliative care. He said that the concept of hospice isn’t known in India. When his father had terminal cancer and the doctors knew that nothing more could be done, he still spent his last three days in a hospital ICU instead of at home surrounded by family. This was deeply disturbing to the family.

I just read Chapter 1 of my new nursing textbook on palliative care for my first course in the Hospice and Palliative Care Masters program at Madonna University. Palliative care, of which hospice is one form, is about caring for the whole person - emotional, social, spiritual and physical - not just the disease. So often the only form of care that is offered at the end of life is medical care which just looks at and treats the physical ramifications of the disease or illness. With a team approach, palliative care aims to treat the whole person, to see the whole person and to enable the patient and the family to be aware of and be helped through all aspects of this important stage of life. An ICU can’t do that. By design, it is a specialty medical area. When a patient is not expected to survive, it is not ideal to be in an ICU. None of us says, “Gee, I want to die in an ICU.”

I propose we spell ICU as “I See You” and create specialty areas where care can focus on the whole person. Let’s equip every hospital that has an ICU with “I See You” care as well.

The concept of Palliative Care is becoming known in India. There are programs that seek to serve people with chronic and debilitating diseases through a team approach. Palliative care concepts are growing all over the world. In response to advances in medical technology, I believe this is an ethical imperative that we add humanistic care back into all medical care, at any stage of life, but especially at the end of life.