An Underserved Minority We Are All Destined to Become
with Ira Byock, MD, Director of Palliative Care, Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center
Presented by Dartmouth Medical School
Wednesday, January 19
6:15 pm, Chilcott Auditorium, Dartmouth Medical School
Ira Byock serves as Director of Palliative Medicine at DHMC in Lebanon and as Professor of Anesthesiology and Community & Family Medicine at Dartmouth Medical School. Involved in hospice and palliative care since the beginning of his career, he helped found a hospice home care program for the indigent population of Fresno, California, during his residency. He has served as President of the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine; as co-founder and principal investigator for the Missoula Demonstration Project, a community-based organization in Montana dedicated to the research and transformation of end-of-life experience locally; and as Director for Promoting Excellence in End-of-Life Care, a national grant program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Byock has authored numerous articles on the ethics and practice of hospice, palliative, and end-of-life care, including Dying Well, a standard in the field, and The Four Things That Matter Most, a widely used counseling tool. A consistent advocate for the voice and rights of dying patients and their families, he has received numerous awards, including the National Hospice Organization’s Person of the Year award and the National Coalition of Cancer Survivorship’s Natalie Davis Spingarn Writers Award. A frequent guest on national television and radio programs, he has appeared on NPR’s “All Things Considered” and “Fresh Air,” Nightline, 60 Minutes, and PBS’s The News Hour, among others.
