Palliative and Hospice Care from a Catholic Perspective, Part 2

How are Catholic hospitals, hospices, and health care systems coping with the challenge of providing morally sound palliative and hospice care?

IHE Director of the M.A. Program in Human Rights William Saunders, J.D., leads a discussion on this topic between Dr. Joseph Meaney (National Catholic Bioethics Center) and Dr. Kerrianne Page (Catholic Health of Long Island). Various approaches and examples will be discussed, with a particular focus on the efforts of Catholic Health located on Long Island, NY. This event is cosponsored by the National Catholic Bioethics Center and is the second collaboration between the NCBC and the IHE on Catholic palliative and hospice care.

William Saunders, J.D., is a graduate of the Harvard Law School who has been involved in issues of public policy, law and ethics for thirty years. A regular columnist for the National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly, Saunders has written widely on these topics, as well as on Catholic social teaching. He is affiliated scholar with the Pellegrino Center for Clinical Ethics at the Georgetown University School of Medicine, a member of the boards of the International Association of Catholic Bioethicists, and the Society of Catholic Social Scientists. In addition to speaking and writing frequently on bioethics topics, Mr. Saunders has submitted testimony to the President’s Council on Bioethics, as well as to UNESCO’s Committee on Bioethics, and has briefed Congressional staff and state legislatures. He is a regular columnist for the National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly. He has given lectures in law schools and colleges throughout the United States and the world. He is the Director of the M.A. Program in Human Rights for the Institute for Human Ecology at The Catholic University of America.

Joseph Meaney, Ph.D., is president of the National Catholic Bioethics Center. He received his Ph.D. in bioethics from the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Rome. His doctoral program was founded by the late Elio Cardinal Sgreccia and linked to the medical school and Gemelli teaching hospital. His dissertation topic was Conscience and Health Care: A Bioethical Analysis. He was director of international outreach and expansion for Human Life International (HLI) and is a leading expert on the international pro-life and family movement, having traveled to eighty-one countries on pro-life missions over the last twenty-five years. He was general editor of the English edition and co-author with his father, Dr. Michael Meaney, of a chapter in the Pontifical Council for the Family’s Lexicon: Ambiguous and Debatable Terms Regarding Family, Life, and Ethical Questions and has published in a number of scholarly journals. He has also written many popular articles and has been interviewed by newspapers, radio, and television in Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe. His popular articles have appeared in the National Catholic Register, Crux, Inside Catholic, Crisis Magazine, Inside the Vatican, and many other publications.

Kerrianne Page, MD, HMDC, is Chief Medical Officer for Hospice, Palliative Care, & Home Care Services and Senior Vice President at Catholic Health, Long Island, New York. Dr. Page has over 20 years of experience as a medical director and clinician with expertise in enhancing the care of people dealing with a serious and life-limiting illness. She is the Medical Director for Good Shepherd Hospice, which provides hospital based and community based palliative care services as well as traditional home hospice and inpatient hospice services, serving over 550 patients each day. She also serves as the Medical Director for Catholic Home Care, the health system’s certified home health agency. After earning her medical degree from the New York University School of Medicine, Dr. Page completed her residency in Internal Medicine at Columbia University Medical Center, and was chosen to serve as a Chief Resident in the Department of Medicine. She is an Assistant Clinical Professor of Medicine at Columbia. She is board certified in Internal Medicine, Hospice and Palliative Medicine, and was among the first group of physicians to attain Hospice Medical Director Certification in 2014.