Quarterly Essay: On Healthcare and Ageing: Karen Hitchcock

In a timely Quarterly Essay, doctor and writer Karen Hitchcock investigates the treatment of the elderly and dying through some unforgettable cases. With honesty and deep experience, she looks at end-of-life decisions, frailty and dementia, over-treatment and attitudes to ageing and death among doctors, patients and their families.

Hitchcock reveals a creeping ageism, often disguised, which threatens to turn the elderly into a ‘burden’ – difficult, hopeless, expensive and homogenous. While we rightly seek to curb treatment when it is futile, harmful or against a patient's wishes, this can sometimes lead to limits on care that suit the system rather than the person. Doctors may declare a situation hopeless when it may not be so.

Hitchcock believes we need to plan for a new future when more of us will be old, with an aim of making that time better, not shorter. And that we must change our institutions to fit the needs of an ageing population.

Karen is a sometimes provocative, always original and deeply informed thinker, as demonstrated in her regular essays on medical issues for The Monthly. In conversation with Ranjana Srivastava, Karen will share her views on and experiences of ageing and the medical system, from an insider’s point of view.