Hospice care focus of seminar March 26

Hospice care will be the topic of a seminar by D. Brookes Cowan on Wednesday, March 26, from 3-5 p.m. in the School of Business building, Room 106.

Her talk, “Hospice Care: Changing the Way We Live and Die,” will be followed by a showing of the documentary, Pioneers of Hospice: Changing the Face of Dying.

The event is sponsored by the Department of Human and Family Studies’ Foote Lecture Fund.

Cowan, a senior lecturer at the University of Vermont, is a medical sociologist specializing in end-of-life care and gerontology.

A grief therapist and hospice volunteer since 1978, Cowan is a long-time advocate for high quality end-of-life care.

As founding chair of the Madison-Dean Initiative, a non-profit organization created to educate the public and the medical profession about care at the end of life, she was instrumental in the making of the documentary, Pioneers of Hospice.

In 2004, Cowan was invited to coordinate the care of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, author of On Death and Dying, during the last week of her life.