The Canadian Hospice Palliative Care Association (CHPCA) is proud to present the 2011 Media Award jointly to the Graduate Journalism Program at Western and the CBC for their series “A Good Death.” The 16-part series, written by students of the Graduate Program of Journalism at Western, investigates various aspects of hospice palliative care in Canada and how Canadians cope with death. “The topic is one that is under-reported and while we live in a culture that avoids talk of death, I felt a project where we could come at it from a number of directions, would work. I wasn’t disappointed,” stated CBC Online Executive Producer Mary Sheppard. “My students have had the courage to enter the lives of many people dying or grieving,” says Faculty of Information & Media Studies lecturer, Meredith Levine. “Through this experience, they witnessed the anguish and fear of those not yet at peace with their coming end, and were graced with the transformative wisdom and beauty of people in their final days.”
The series can be found online at http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/features/a-good-death.