The Lancet Commission on the Value of Death Modern health care has an unhappy relationship with death. We need to improve the relationship.
The Lancet is one of the world’s oldest and most respected medical journals. It has just launched the Lancet Commission on the Value of Death. The Commission writes: “Our relationship with death and dying has become unbalanced, and we advocate a rebalancing. At the core of this rebalancing must be relationships and partnerships between people who are dying, families, communities, health and social care systems, and wider civic society.
“It’s an age-old idea that a good life and a good death go together. Our title has proved to be a rich source of thinking, helping us recognise the value of death in a world that tends to deny death any value. The simplest proposition of the value of death is that ‘without death every birth would be a tragedy,’ and in a very crowded world we are the edge of such a tragedy. In the report we explore the many values of death.”