Events
2/21/2018 – With Dr. Barbara Brandt and Dr. Erin Fraher
1/24/18 – Join us to hear real-life examples of healthcare professionals from the UNC Interdisciplinary Parkinson’s Disease Clinic working across disciplines to provide quality patient care.
This event is open to students, faculty, staff and practitioners.
12/5/2017-12/15/2017 – What is CLARION? CLARION is a national case competition held yearly at the University of Minnesota dedicated to improving healthcare through interprofessional collaboration. Teams consisting of four students from different health professional schools conduct a root cause analysis on a fictitious case regarding a complex healthcare challenge. The teams then travel to Minnesota to present their solutions to a panel of judges at this national competition April 14, 2018. UNC’s team has done extremely well in the past, winning FIRST PLACE in 2015!!!
Being part of the CLARION team gives students the ability to network with prestigious faculty members from the school of medicine, nursing, pharmacy, and public health, as well as administrators from the UNC hospital and other key stakeholders. Furthermore, students gain perspectives in both healthcare systems and clinical knowledge as well as learning team competency skills that are very applicable to the real-life hospital setting.
8/22/2017 – 9/1/2017 – Interprofessional student group discussions of When Breath Becomes Air
Book Project Fall 2017: When Breath Becomes Air
UNC Health Affairs announces its first summer reading program. The book for 2017: When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi.
At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a naïve medical student “possessed,” as he wrote, “by the question of what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life” into a neurosurgeon at Stanford working in the brain, the most critical place for human identity, and finally into a patient and new father confronting his own mortality.
What makes life worth living in the face of death? What do you do when the future, no longer a ladder toward your goals in life, flattens out into a perpetual present? What does it mean to have a child, to nurture a new life as another fades away? These are some of the questions Kalanithi wrestles with in this profoundly moving, exquisitely observed memoir.
Paul Kalanithi died in March 2015, while working on this book, yet his words live on as a guide and a gift to us all. “I began to realize that coming face to face with my own mortality, in a sense, had changed nothing and everything,” he wrote. “Seven words from Samuel Beckett began to repeat in my head: ‘I can’t go on. I’ll go on.’” When Breath Becomes Air is an unforgettable, life-affirming reflection on the challenge of facing death and on the relationship between doctor and patient, from a brilliant writer who became both.
Book summary provided by Penguin Random House.
Special thanks to Alison Spannaus and the Carolina Summer Reading Program.
Local Book Sellers
Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill
UNC Book Store
Order from:
Amazon.com
Barnes&Noble.com
Book Reviews
How Long Have I Got Left? by Paul Kalanithi
Before I Go: Time Warps for a Young Surgeon with Metastatic Lung Cancer by Paul Kalanithi
NPR interview with Dr. Kalanithi’s wife
Book Discussion
Discussing death and dying can be difficult. Here are counseling resources in the area.
Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS) at UNC
Located on campus, CAPS offers a variety of mental health services and is committed to supporting all students in need. Check their website for walk-in service hours.
UNC Medical Center Bereavement Support Services
Resources to help cope with the loss of a loved one.
