Pioneer in the humanization of medicine and the development of palliative care, both adults and children, the Department of Continuous Medical Education of the British Hospital summoned a Spanish specialist to provide a talk to their professionals, who responded massively to the call.
Doctor Enric Benito is an oncologist and palliative care expert. Honor member of the Spanish Palliative Care Society (SECPAL), Benito is an outstanding speaker and international reference in the issues of his specialty.
The auditorium of the British hospital full of professionals – medical nurses and psychologists of the institution, as well as the official deputy Luis Gallo and the director of the British hospital, Cr. Walter Pereyra – received days ago to the Spanish expert, who gave a talk entitled “The care of those who care”, in which he was sharing his experiences and experiences as an oncologist and specialist in palliative care.
Appealing to his own vital career, Benito recalled how, at 40 and a few years, an existential crisis led him to migrate from oncology to palliative care, marking a true vocational finding: “I have come to help people die well.”
He argued that in those years the cancer teams did not accept to apply palliative care because they considered it “a failure, the worst”, when “the worst thing is to die alone, with pain and fear.”
“The time to die is not fixed with the traditional model of the scientific method, (…) there is a lot of suffering that is not collected. You have to work on spirituality and suffering,” he said.
“The body hurts, the person suffers, (…) the pain goes with drugs, suffering does not,” the expert graphs and stressed the importance of accompanying the process of acceptance of the situation, so that the energy put until that moment in the denial, anger or depression becomes peace and serenity.
It is, he explained, “integrating suffering into the equation, understanding suffering as a syndrome. The truth is always accompanied by peace.”
He called to reflect on “the quality of human presence” understood as “the tool you have” and celebrated that the British hospital generated an instance to “put light on a subject that is not normally talked about.”
Benito said that “healing is not possible but healing” and summoned those present to “to move from the screen (with patient information) to the person.”
The expert defined “attending suffering and spiritual accompaniment” as “the backbone of palliative care” and insisted on advancing in a paradigm shift: “Compassion is the name that takes love when faced with suffering. Humanizing is to put humans accompanying suffering.”
“Suffering is a human experience to grow. The expression of discomfort is not something that must be tried to avoid. Suffering is not a pathology that must be resolved, it is a human experience that must be accompanied and transcended. Compassion is the result of understanding.”
The Spanish specialist was internalized from the work of years of the British hospital in the field of humanization of medicine, as well as in palliative care, both adults and children: “I want to congratulate them because they are pioneers, (…) is a change that has not yet occurred in most hospitals,” he celebrated.
The adult palliative care unit of the British hospital, led by Dr. Lila Borrás, who opened the talk and welcomed Benito, has fifteen years of experience and is an active generator and diffuser of knowledge linked to her specialty.
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