Additional Resources For Hospice & Palliative Care

Organizations

Experts

Ira Byock, MD, FAAHPM 

A leading medical authority, author, and public advocate for improving care for people living with serious medical conditions. Dr. Byock is an active emeritus professor of medicine and community & family medicine at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine. During his clinical career, he earned specialty certifications in Family Medicine, Emergency Medicine, and Hospice & Palliative Medicine. Dr. Byock has been involved in hospice and palliative care since 1978. He is a past president of the Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine. From 1996 to 2006, Dr. Byock directed a national grant project of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation that developed prototypes for concurrent palliative care within mainstream health care. From 2003 to 2013, he led the Section of Palliative Care within the the Dartmouth Health system based in New Hampshire. In 2014, Dr. Byock founded the Institute for Human Caring within the multi-state Providence health system. The Institute drives transformation to make caring for whole persons the new normal. The Institute’s change strategies produce measurable and scalable improvements in health care quality and efficiency. Since leaving his position with the Institute in 2022, Dr. Byock is the Principal Consultant for Clinical Transformation Specialists PLLC, which advances highly personalized care as a values strategy for American healthcare. Dr. Byock has authored numerous articles in academic journals. His research has contributed to conceptual frameworks for the lived experience of illness, developed measures for subjective quality of life, and refined counseling methods for life completion and wellbeing. His article, Taking Psychedelics Seriously, in 2018, helped spark renewed interest in psychedelic-assisted therapies within the field of palliative care. His first book, Dying Well, became a standard in the field of hospice and palliative care. The Four Things That Matter Most is widely used in counseling within palliative care, pastoral care, and psychology. The Best Care Possible presents the potential for health care transformation. Dr. Byock lectures nationally