Charlotte Holland
Consultant Paediatrician
Charlotte is one of the doctors at Helen & Douglas House. As well as helping to provide the best care for the children at the hospice, she is also passionate about contributing to paediatric palliative care conversations and education.
1. Difficult decisions & how to make them.
2. Tolerating risk when no option is ‘good.’
3. Ethics panels & mediation: how can they help?
4. Withholding or withdrawing: is there a difference?
5. Survival in extreme prematurity: challenges faced.
6. Approaching adulthood: challenges faced.
7. Spirtual support where there are ethical challenges.
These series’ have proved emmensely popular with healthcare and allied professionals that attend. As well as clinical and healthcare professionals attending these sessions, the conversation is also welcome to those without clinical background. Some non-clinical Helen & Douglas staff have also attended these sessions and found them extremely thought-provoking.
Highlights from these sessions
- Our very own Dr Emily Harrop presenting an ‘ALARP’ (As Low As Reasonably Practicable) model of risk alongside an Air Safety Expert Ronnie, exploring how sometimes with complex cases we have to accept an element of risk but achieves such higher benefit (an example would be a child dependent on a tube to help them breathe called a tracheostomy, who would be stuck in hospital if we accepted no level of risk but greatly wishes to be at home)
- Supporting a parent and grandparent speaker to talk about difficult decision-making for their little girl in intensive care, exploring what helped them through this journey and what they felt could have been done differently – we are particularly grateful to this family, and they had our highest ever live audience of 65 attendees, and many more who have viewed the session on catch-up!
- Our youth worker Polly Baker-Windsor highlighting physical, emotional, educational and social needs of our teenagers, the ethical and legal challenges that they or their families may start to experience as they are approaching adulthood
- Rev Dr Paul Nash giving us the space and insight to examine our own views and challenges with spirituality, and consider how we may best address the needs of our children and families
- Trying out our acting skills to demo the way mediation can help
Feedback
“Really thought provoking that we need to completely wipe personal agendas and just listen, reflect what we hear and check we have understood”
“This has been a really interesting introduction to an area of palliative care that I have no experience of. The wealth of experience that has been shared, the empathetic approaches that have been described have been enlightening. Thank you”
“Really knowledgeable and pragmatic inclusive approaches discussed to spiritualty and spiritual care”
Future webinars
And people keep asking for more sessions! And so, we launch our 2025 ‘Spotlight’ series: shining a spotlight on palliative care principles and challenges for each paediatric specialty in turn. We know the children we care for are managed by multiple sub-specialty doctors at different points in their time, including neonatal, respiratory, neurology, community teams, intensive care and more. Only by talking to each other, and learning from each other, can we best deliver patient- and family-centred care across all settings – the true holistic nature of palliative care.
- Paediatric Palliative Care & Research
- Paediatric Palliative Care & Community Paediatrics
- Paediatric Palliative Care & Fetal Medicine
- Paediatric Palliative Care & Paediatric Intensive Care
- Paediatric Palliative Care & Respiratory
- Paediatric Palliative Care & Oncology
- Paediatric Palliative Care & Community Teams
- Paediatric Palliative Care & Safeguarding