Opening up the conversation on dying

6th June 2026

St Luke’s brand new podcast

St Luke’s is launching a brand-new podcast to help open up the conversation about death and dying.

The St Luke’s education team are working in partnership with Livewell and Macmillan GP Facilitators from Plymouth, South Hams and West Devon to create a regular podcast for health and social care professionals centred around facilitating good end of life care. The podcast will cover a range of end-of-life care topics, offering top tips and tools to practitioners based on best practice guidance and day to day experience.

The idea came about following feedback from local healthcare professionals highlighting that there was a need for more readily accessible education resources aimed at palliative care practitioners, especially ones that suit our current busy lifestyles.

From this feedback the idea for the 15 minute ‘All about end of life care’ audio and video podcasts was born.

Working in partnership

NHS Devon are supporting local hospices to deliver a Devon-wide education programme aimed at community care. Working in partnership with other local stakeholders has allowed us to contribute to this work whilst meeting local need.

The team have been working with Fresh Air Studios to initially develop a series of four podcasts with the hope to deliver more in the future.

The four podcasts the team initially plan to cover:

  1. Diagnosing dying and how to tell those who need to know
  2. Advance Care Planning
  3. Treatment Escalation Plans (TEPs and eTEPs)
  4. Prescribing at end of life

The podcasts can be listened to or watched anywhere at any time, whether driving to work, out for a walk or on the bus or could form part of an educational meeting.

Listen now

Paula Hine, St Luke’s Head of Education, said: “We know that end of life care is just one area of care that busy community health and social care professionals are involved in and that they find it increasingly difficult to have the time to access education and training. We therefore wanted to provide some bite-size, easy to access resources which they can dip into as and when suits them.

“The sessions share not only the key ‘must do’s’ but also some useful and practical ways to overcome some of the day-to-day challenges that we face in practice when caring for patients and families at end of life. Although hosted on our website we can also send links to the resources when sending email alerts or updates so hopefully reaching people when they need the information and it is most relevant.”

You can listen to the first episode of the podcast ‘Diagnosing dying and how to tell those who need to know’ and access the relevant resources here. The second episode is due to be released next week.

Listen to the podcast Information hub

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