536 - Death and Public Health Part I: How to Talk About Death and Dying
Public Health On Call
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
4.6 • 644 Ratings
🗓️ 28 October 2022
⏱️ 15 minutes
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Summary
Conversations about death and dying between physicians and patients or patients and loved ones are difficult but important. Dr. Jillian Tullis, a professor in Communication at the University of San Diego, talks with Lindsay Smith Rogers about why these conversations are important to dying well, some tools for starting the conversation (especially with loved ones who may be resistant to the topic), and some important things to consider when inquiring about someone's wishes. They also discuss how COVID-19 created an "accumulation of death experiences" that may influence how our society thinks about grief, bereavement, and "a good death" going forward.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. |
| 0:12.0 | I'm Joshua Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, |
| 0:17.0 | and a former health commissioner here in Baltimore. |
| 0:19.7 | Our goal is to bring evidence and experience to illuminate critical public health issues. |
| 0:25.4 | If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to public health question at jhh.edu. |
| 0:31.5 | That's public health question at jh.hu.edu for future podcast episodes. |
| 0:38.4 | Hi, I'm Lindsay Smith-Rogers, producer of Public Health on Call. |
| 0:42.5 | Death may seem like the antithesis to public health, but as Dr. Sandra Galeo, Boston University |
| 0:48.6 | School Public Health Dean once said, the data is clear. 100% of us will die. In a two-part series, death and public health, |
| 0:57.9 | we'll be exploring the end of life as a public health issue. Today, in part one, I talk with |
| 1:04.6 | Dr. Gillian Tellis, a professor in communication at the University of San Diego, whose research |
| 1:10.5 | focuses on death and dying in health care settings. |
| 1:13.6 | We talk about how to talk about death and dying with loved ones, why the conversation is so difficult, and some tools for having these conversations. |
| 1:22.6 | We also talk about how the COVID pandemic and a proposed bill in Congress for a national strategy on grief could help create some change needed for all of us to think about what it means to die well. Let's listen. |
| 1:38.3 | Julian Tell us, thank you so much for joining us on public health on call. You are a professor with a focus on death and dying, |
| 1:46.4 | and it might seem a little strange to talk about death on a podcast about public health, |
| 1:51.8 | but death is a huge part of life. So tell us a little bit about your research and your work, |
| 1:56.6 | studying how people view and talk about death. Well, first of all, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. |
| 2:03.1 | I have been studying how people talk of dying and death for quite some time. |
| 2:08.1 | And I've always been interested in why the conversation is difficult for people. |
| 2:13.7 | And so what I have spent time doing is trying to be in spaces and places where people have these conversations such as hospitals and hospices and sometimes in my classrooms and thinking about why this is such a difficult topic for people to explore. |
| 2:29.8 | What have you learned about that? |
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