Dr. David Currow, internationally known physician-scientist, author and educator, has been named director of Palliative Medicine and Hospice Care at Dartmouth-Hitchcock. He will join Dartmouth-Hitchcock and the Geisel School of Medicine as Professor of Medicine in January 2015.
Dr. Currow will lead Dartmouth-Hitchcock’s new Center for Palliative and Hospice Care, currently in the planning stages. The Center will provide interdisciplinary patient- and family-centered care, applying the latest thinking and techniques, while offering unprecedented opportunities for teaching, training, and research for health care providers and clinicians in training from across the United States.
“Joining the team at Dartmouth-Hitchcock is an exciting opportunity to work with an organization that is taking a holistic approach to population health in New Hampshire and Vermont,” Dr. Currow said from his office in Australia. “This opens the potential to join a team that continues the work of improving the health of the community. Care at the end of life is an integral part of optimizing the health of everyone.
“The reason palliative care is important is that it is the time of people’s lives when they really focus on what is important to them. When you have limited life expectancy, limited energy and potentially limited mobility, a person really does focus on the things that mean the most to them. Ensuring they can make the most use of that time is a privilege for clinicians working with people at the end of life.”