Home » People's Experiences » The road from delivering babies to hospice doctor
As a young doctor in Britain in the late 1950s Dr Jonathon Hartfield was taught and he believed that every disease and illness would be “cured” and that “dying was soon to be overcome”. This idealist training and his love and caring for people, prompted him in 1961 to move his young family to Africa. Here he worked in a busy South Nigerian hospital. Life was very hard and many people, especially children died of curable diseases. During a decade in Nigeria he “worked with death in many guises.’’ This included the ravages of the Biafram Civil War, where he observed more people die of starvation, than from bullets.
In June 1973 Dr Hartfield arrived with his family to Wanganui. He fell in love with good schools, the climate, plenty of music, and ended up settling on five acres of “sand, hill and marsh”. He helped setup the Obstetrics and Gynaecology service at the public hospital.
Dr Hartfield became concerned about the “conspiracy of silence about death” among health professionals and the relatives of dying patients. He was instrumental in organizing a seminar for nurses and doctors on how to deal with dying and “being honest to patients about their illness”.
When the Chairman of the Area Health Board suggested a hospice service for Wanganui she invited Dr Hartfield onto the planning committee. The service began in 1981. It was Hospice in the Home but had two hospital beds for GPs to use. The beds were lost in the hospital reforms but the home service continued runs by GPs’.
After studying theology Dr Hartfield was ordained as an Anglican Priest in 1986 and later retired from surgical practice in 1996. A year later when a more comprehensive service was being planned he and his wife Meg, a nurse joined the team. In 2004 the service moved into a custom-made building and the hospice now has about 90 people at any one time.
“Palliative care is a long way from delivering babies, but dying and giving birth are both natural phases of life, both important family events, and both frequently attended by pain,” says Dr Hartfield. He believes people, in both birth and death, need support, encouragement and compassion, until the process is complete.