: For Students, Faculty, and Staff 
For many of us, the topic of death and dying can be uncomfortable. This discomfort can lead to a lack of conversation and education about death, dying, and disposition. These gaps extend into the educational programs across the health professions so the University’s Center for Interprofessional Health collaborated with the UMN Geriatrics Workforce Enhancement Program to create a University-wide task force on Death, Dying, and Disposition.
The homepage of the ‘Death, Dying & End of Life Resources’ site from the National Center for Interprofessional Practice and Education.
The task force formed subcommittees to expand skills across curriculum and build a sustainable collection of publicly available resources such as websites and videos on these topics for practitioners and the public. These needs of these subcommittees were a perfect match for the expertise of health sciences librarians.
Developing an online toolkit
Katherine Chew, MLIS
Health sciences librarians are experts at finding and evaluating the quality of health information, so Mortuary Science Librarian Katherine Chew (now retired) and Veterinary Medicine Librarian André Nault were integral partners on the sub-committee charged with creating an online resource of freely-available materials on these topics.
Nault and Chew identified resources to add to this new, online resource, which span topics such as delivering news to family members, identifying the signs of death, advanced care planning, and ritual or religious practices around death and burial. The goal was to develop a list of resources that faculty in the health sciences could find and use in classroom and experiential learning settings to enhance skills.
Teresa Schicker, Program Manager for the project noted that Nault and Chew, “offered exceptional advice and guided our task force through thoughtful questions about the purpose, access, inclusiveness, and sustainability of the materials that were ultimately selected for inclusion.”
Valuable lessons learned
André Nault, MLIS
Chew served as the liaison librarian to Mortuary science for over 20 years in the Health Sciences Library so thinking about and talking about death wasn’t new to her. What struck her as part of this work was how the language of talking about death has shifted and changed over time from “assisted suicide” to “medical aid in dying” and now people say “death with dignity” to describe the concept.
Nault has been a domain expert in veterinary medicine for many years and saw that “the health care professions are primarily concerned with diagnosing and treating disease, not supporting the death process.” He found that his work on this group was meeting largely unmet and underserved needs of the academic communities and of the public.
Find out more
The collection of Death, Dying and End of Life Resources is now available for everyone. Experts are invited to contribute to the resource collection and comment on any resource’s usefulness. If you want to join the curation team for this online library, please contact MN-GWEP@UMN.EDU
Funding support was provided by Katherine R. & C. Walton Lillehei Foundation, which supported curation of the library, and the Minnesota Northstar GWEP which is supported by the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Awards U1QHP33076 and U1QHP53045. The contents are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the official views of, nor an endorsement, by HRSA, HHS or the U.S. Government.
