Centre for the Promotion of Excellence in Palliative Care

The Leicestershire and Rutland Hospice (LOROS) and De Montfort University have worked collaboratively for many years and together established the Centre for the Promotion of Excellence in Palliative Care (CPEP) in 2012. CPEP demonstrates both organisations commitment to enhance the delivery of holistic, person-centred, evidence-based palliative care across all care settings.

By combining the expertise and resources of the hospice with those of the University CPEP aims to influence the quality of palliative care for people approaching the end of their life and the support provided to their friends and families. This will be achieved by:

  • raising the profile of matters related to the end of life amongst the general public
  • undertaking research directly relevant to the care of people with advanced illness
  • influencing the education of health and social care professionals so as to transform the delivery of end of life care

CPEP is based in Edith Murphy House at the City campus of De Montfort University. It is headed by Professor Jayne Brown and Professor Christina Faull.

Find out more about Palliative Care Education

Dying Awareness and Richard III

Find out how the discovery of the remains of Richard III can stimulate us to think about the ways we continue to have bonds with those that have gone before.

What Will Survive of us?

  1. Our bodies

    Ten thousand years ago people in the Near East plastered the skulls of their forebears as a way to extend the relationship between the living and the dead past the point of death.

    In the nineteenth century the bereaved wore jewellery made with the hair of deceased relatives and friends.

    Today you can have cremated ashes made into jewellry or incorporated into a tattoo; in the ancient world cremated human remains might be incorporated into pottery.

    Some people decide that their body parts should extend the lives of other people after they die. Do they live on in their transplanted organs?

  2. Our souls

    Most religions believe that some part of you will survive the death of the body. The soul or some essential spirit lives on - perhaps in Heaven, or as a ghost.

    Image of the soul leaving the dead body, from the sixteenth-century text Rosarium Philosophorum

    Others - such as ancient Egyptians and modern Hindus – believe that a person’s essential spirit can be reincarnated in another body.

    Traditional burning ghat for cremations, Varanasi, India, image courtesy of Jorge Royan

  3. Our descendents

    We leave a direct genetic legacy in our surviving children.

    Our children, grandchildren and further descendants might carry something of us down the years: whether that is a big nose, a talent for music or a susceptibility to certain diseases.

    How much should we try to control what gets passed on in our genes?

    Do we survive also in the values, skills and aspirations we teach our children?

  4. Our memories

    We live on in the memories of those who have known us. We live on in a joke, a turn of phrase, a gesture unconciously adopted.

    In the past people have also made material memorials to keep those memories fresh. These range from photographs to gravestones to massive monuments such as the Taj Mahal.

    In the present the dead might be remembered in a bunch of flowers taped to a lamp-post, or a plaque on a bench in a special place.

    This is a ‘Ghost Bike’; painted white and placed on the streets of Manchester tribute to Josh Phillips who died after a bike accident in 2006.

    Some people choose what legacy they leave; like David Tasma who was the first person to donate to help St Christopher’s Hospice, and the modern day Hospice Movement come into being.

  5. A patient's view

    Dying Matters Awareness

    One of the patients who comes to LOROS has worked with Professor Faull to share his thoughts about dying. He communicates these thoughts in both words and through his photographs.

    The moment of death is for the majority of people the most terrifying vision. The experience, which everyone will have to face is accompanied by dozens of questions. Everyone is thinking from time to time about what the moment will look like in which he has to say goodbye to the world- when will that be? will it hurt and perhaps the most important – if there is something there on the other side? Although explored by scientists, philosophers and theologians many of these questions cannot be answered unequivocally.

    Death is a personal and individual experience.

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