About Empathy

Mitchell Consky is a Toronto- based journalist. His work has been published in the Globe and Mail, CTV News and other international news outlets. Mitch has written and published a book entitled Home Safe: A Memoir Of End-of-life Care During Covid-19. This work is centered around his father, Harvey Consky, a Toronto based lawyer and beloved family man. Through his book, Mitch helped preserve his father’s legacy in writing. A portion of Mitch’s author royalties will be donated to cancer research at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto. 

In this episode, Mitch tells us about who his father Harvey was as a person and how his experience with cancer impacted their whole family. Mitch also shares the ups and downs, the joys and the struggles, of providing palliative care for his father at home during the pandemic.

Legacy Building Activities, Hospice Waterloo: https://www.hospicewaterloo.ca/legacy-activities/

Even when an Advance Care Plan is in place, Dr Maria Muraca learned that unforeseen circumstances can come up. Maria was the Power of Attorney for her father, Michele, who died one year ago of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. Maria is a family physician, as well as an advocate and teacher of advance care planning. She is here to tell us about her personal experience with her father’s changing advance care plan and how that has shaped her discussions with patients and health care workers.

Doctors for Protection from Guns https://www.doctorsforprotectionfromguns.ca

Over the last year, the impact of systemic racism in healthcare has come into sharper focus. From racialized populations being disproportionately impacted by COVID-19, to the cruel and senseless death of Joyce Echaquan in a Quebec hospital, it is more important than ever to look inwards at our own racial biases and at the widespread inequity that exists in the health care system. 

RESOURCES

Indigenous Cultural Safety Training Program https://www.sanyas.ca

Indigenous Health Primer from the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada https://www.royalcollege.ca/rcsite/documents/health-policy/indigenous-health-primer-e.pdf

Harvard Implicit Bias Test https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/user/agg/blindspot/indexrk.htm

Stacey (Greenberg) is here today to tell us about her father who lived with Multiple Sclerosis in a long-term care facility since 2014. During the pandemic, Stacey had limited contact with her father and he was sadly isolated from his loved ones in his final days due to COVID-19 visitor and caregiver restrictions. Although he did not die of COVID-19, there were significant changes that impacted his daily life.