Five songs providing a snapshot of how the pandemic year felt on the patient care front lines

A month before his 49th birthday, Geoffrey Fleming, MD, had a biopsy of his liver to diagnose an unidentified metastatic disease that he already knew was “something bad.”

There has been nothing normal about the COVID-19 pandemic, and grieving the loss of a life at a time when families have been unable to gather beside a bedside to say goodbye, or to even hold a traditional funeral, has been one of the worst consequences of this health crisis’s uncharted territory.

Dan Kula remembers entering a patient’s room on the Palliative Care Unit at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and immediately sensing the man’s agitation, which can be a symptom for those who are terminally ill.

Friends of Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt, a volunteer organization, recently committed $1 million over the next three years to be split between two crucial pediatric programs: diabetes and palliative care.

A Vanderbilt study sheds new light on the impact of palliative care.

More than 80 people attended a Palliative Care Conference in Nashville recently that was led by faculty members of the Palliative Care programs at VUMC and the Nashville VA Medical Center, and VUMC Center for Biomedical Ethics.