Dr. Leslie Blackhall, Head of Palliative Care at the University of Virginia, believes that accepting dying as a part of life allows us to achieve a fuller and richer life with the days that we live.


Dr. Blackhall has had a career-long focus on the care of patients with life-limiting illnesses, starting in her residency when she published a ground-breaking paper on medical futility in the New England Journal of Medicine. Since then, her mission has been to promote the understanding of end of life as a developmental stage and part of the continuum of care for all patients, and to transform medical education and health care systems to ensure patients in this stage of life receive compassionate, mindful, interprofessional and clinically excellent care. She was a program leader for a 2012 CMS Innovation Award, which integrates patient-reported outcomes into the electronic medical record as a guide to improving the quality of life, care coordination and end-of-life care planning for patients with incurable malignancies. She is the winner of the 2015 American Cancer Society Lane Adams Quality of Life Award for her work with cancer patients.



This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx