James Gordon Brown is a British politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Leader of the Labour Party from 2007 to 2010. He previously served as Chancellor of the Exchequer under Tony Blair from 1997 to 2007. He was Member of Parliament (MP) for Dunfermline East from 1983 to 2005 and, following boundary changes, Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath from 2005 to 2015. Brown is both the most recent Labour Party politician and the most recent Scottish politician to hold the office of prime minister.
Absolutely Fabulous is a British television sitcom based on the French and Saunders sketch, "Modern Mother and Daughter", created by Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders. The show was created and written by Saunders, who also stars as one of the main characters with Joanna Lumley and Julia Sawalha.
Palliative care is an interdisciplinary medical caregiving approach aimed at optimizing quality of life and mitigating suffering among people with serious, complex, and often terminal illnesses. Within the published literature, many definitions of palliative care exist. The World Health Organization (WHO) describes palliative care as "an approach that improves the quality of life of patients and their families facing the problems associated with life-threatening illness, through the prevention and relief of suffering by means of early identification and impeccable assessment and treatment of pain and other problems, physical, psychosocial, and spiritual". In the past, palliative care was a disease specific approach, but today the WHO takes a broader patient-centered approach that suggests that the principles of palliative care should be applied as early as possible to any chronic and ultimately fatal illness. This shift was important because if a disease-oriented approach is followed, the needs and preferences of the patient are not fully met and aspects of care, such as pain, quality of life, and social support, as well as spiritual and emotional needs, fail to be addressed. Rather, a patient-centered model prioritizes relief of suffering and tailors care to increase the quality of life for terminally ill patients.
Dawn Roma French is a British actress, comedian, presenter and writer. French is known for writing and starring on the BBC comedy sketch show French and Saunders with her best friend and comedy partner, Jennifer Saunders, and played the lead role as Geraldine Granger in the BBC sitcom The Vicar of Dibley. She has been nominated for seven BAFTA TV Awards and won a BAFTA Fellowship with Saunders in 2009.
Mary Louisa "Polly" Toynbee is a British journalist and writer. She has been a columnist for The Guardian newspaper since 1998.
Dame Cicely Mary Strode Saunders was an English nurse, social worker, physician and writer. She is noted for her work in terminal care research and her role in the birth of the hospice movement, emphasising the importance of palliative care in modern medicine, and opposing the legalisation of voluntary euthanasia.
Jonathan Saul Freedland is a British journalist who writes a weekly column for the Guardian. He presents BBC Radio 4's contemporary history series The Long View. Freedland also writes thrillers, mainly under the pseudonym Sam Bourne, and has written a play, Jews. In Their Own Words, performed in 2022 at the Royal Court Theatre, London.
Sir Simon David Jenkins FLSW is a British author, a newspaper columnist and editor. He was editor of the Evening Standard from 1976 to 1978 and of The Times from 1990 to 1992.
George Saunders is an American writer of short stories, essays, novellas, children's books, and novels. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, McSweeney's, and GQ. He also contributed a weekly column, American Psyche, to The Guardian's weekend magazine between 2006 and 2008.
The Florence Nightingale Faculty of Nursing, Midwifery & Palliative Care is an academic faculty within King's College London. The faculty is the world's first nursing school to be continuously connected to a fully serving hospital and medical school. Established on 9 July 1860 by Florence Nightingale, the founder of modern nursing, it was a model for many similar training schools through the UK, Commonwealth and other countries for the latter half of the 19th century. It is primarily concerned with the education of people to become nurses and midwives. It also carries out nursing research, continuing professional development and postgraduate programmes. The Faculty forms part of the Waterloo campus on the South Bank of the River Thames and is now one of the largest faculties in the university.
Emran Mian, who writes under the pen name Kamran Nazeer, is a British Pakistani author and civil servant.
Balfour M. Mount, is a Canadian physician, surgeon, and academic. He is considered the father of palliative care in North America.
Sarah Jane Brown, usually known as Sarah Brown, is an English campaigner for global health and education, founder and president of the children's charity Theirworld, the Executive Chair of the Global Business Coalition for Education and the co-founder of A World at School.
A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair is a 2003 book by the political scientist Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, previously the author of Hitler's Willing Executioners (1996). Goldhagen examines the Roman Catholic Church's role in the Holocaust and offers a review of scholarship in English addressing what he argues is antisemitism throughout the history of the Church, which he claims contributed substantially to the persecution of the Jews during World War II.
Hospice care is a type of health care that focuses on the palliation of a terminally ill patient's pain and symptoms and attending to their emotional and spiritual needs at the end of life. Hospice care prioritizes comfort and quality of life by reducing pain and suffering. Hospice care provides an alternative to therapies focused on life-prolonging measures that may be arduous, likely to cause more symptoms, or are not aligned with a person's goals.
Jennifer Louise Worth RN RM was a British memoirist. She wrote a best-selling trilogy about her work as a nurse and midwife practising in the poverty-stricken East End of London in the 1950s: Call the Midwife (2002), Shadows of the Workhouse (2005) and Farewell to The East End (2009). A television series, Call the Midwife, based on her books, began broadcasting on BBC One on 15 January 2012. After leaving nursing, she re-trained as a musician.
Eric Metaxas is an American author, speaker, and conservative radio host. He has written three biographies, Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery about William Wilberforce (2007), Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy about Dietrich Bonhoeffer (2011), Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World (2017), If You Can Keep it (2017), Fish Out of Water: A Search for the Meaning of Life (2021) and Letter to the American Church (2022). He has also written humor, children's books and scripts for VeggieTales.
Lincoln in the Bardo is a 2017 experimental novel by American writer George Saunders. It is Saunders's first full-length novel and was the New York Times hardcover fiction bestseller for the week of March 5, 2017.
Margaret Ruth Redpath AO is a retired Australian surgeon and radiation oncologist. She worked as a palliative care pioneer in Australia and the United Kingdom. She has also been a senior priest in the Anglican Church of Australia, particularly at St Paul's Cathedral, Melbourne. Redpath was awarded the Order of Australia medal and awarded a Doctor of Medical Science by the University of Melbourne.
Mary Jean Baines was a British palliative care physician. Alongside her colleague Dame Cicely Saunders, she has been called one of the founders of the palliative care movement. She worked at St Christopher's Hospice in London from 1968 to 1997, and from there she established the United Kingdom's first community-based end-of-life care service.
