2013 Hastings Center Cunniff-Dixon Physician Awards

The Hasting Center has
announced the 2013 winners of the Hastings Center Cunniff-Dixon Physician
Awards.  

The purpose of these five prizes (one to a senior physician, one
to a mid-career physician, and three to early-career physicians) is to foster
those skills and virtues by providing financial prizes to those physicians who have shown their care of patients to be exemplary, a model
of good medicine for other physicians, and a great benefit in advancing the centrality
of end-of-life care as a basic part of the doctor-patient relationship.

Here is the rationale for the award:  Care for patients at
the end of life has long troubled American medicine, not only in its failure to
provide good palliative care, but also in the relationship between doctors and
patients. Many efforts to remedy this situation have emerged: 

• A growing and
  strengthening palliative care movement,


• Better understanding of the situation
  of patients at the end of life, 


• A sharper focus on the values and behavior of
  physicians in their care of the dying, 


• A more general effort to gain
  medical recognition that end-of-life care is just as important as care during
  all other phases of life. 

Great progress has been made, but there is still a
distance to go. As the number and percentage of people who die from chronic and
degenerative diseases increase, the physician skills and virtues necessary to
provide good end-of-life care also increase.