Barbara Saunders
Barbara Saunders was an expert in palliative care and the care of older people. She retired from her position as director of nursing at St Christopher’s Hospice in 1991 and currently works as a volunteer bereavement visitor in Kent.
Barbara is proud to have been the nurse in the first multidisciplinary team in a general hospital (St Thomas’) – when at the time there was only one other in the world. She found enormous satisfaction seeing doctors and nurses learn to control the symptoms of terminal malignant disease. She then took this knowledge into the surrounding community and was able to share it in this country and abroad. She is happy that there are now hundreds of such teams in the world.
Barbara worked at an international level and lectured and presented papers on palliative care at conferences around the world.
Her inspirations have been Miss B. Rees, a ward sister; Miss Barbara Fawkes FRCN, her senior tutor; and Florence Nightingale, who she sees as an attitude-changing pioneer who really got beside patients and heard their stories, attempted to relieve their sufferings and taught others to do the same.
Her own vision for the future is one where nurses will always be the patient’s advocate, being sensitive to their needs and being good listeners. In the long term she hopes that all patients in hospital and at home, whatever their illnesses, will have their symptoms controlled and be able to have the best quality of life until death.
Barbara lives in Beckenham.
Publications
- Nurse’s role in day care, Gerontologia Clinica, 1974
- The terminal care support team, Nursing, 1980
- Staff support, Nursing, 1982
- Care of the dying patient in hospital in Robbins’ Care of the dying patient and the family, 1983, 1989.