My Working Day:Philip Larkin is a Galway-based lecturer in palliative care. He was the recipient of the first Irish Research Fellowship in Palliative Care, in 2003
Being a university lecturer means that your working day has a very flexible description. Most academics have two hats; a teaching role and a responsibility for research. The Department of Nursing and Midwifery Studies at NUI Galway has a busy research profile, particularly around older person care and end-of-life care.
I am involved in a project looking at older people's experiences of death and dying, so that has been a priority for me over the summer. As the new academic year is about to start, I need to find a balance between my teaching commitments and my research.
I would not teach every day, but we do teach across the undergraduate and postgraduate programmes. My own area of expertise is palliative care and I am programme director for the postgraduate diploma in nursing (palliative care), which is a course designed for qualified nurses with a specific interest in the care of patients at the end-of-life.
I think most nurses in higher education have an expectation that their teacher is not working from a book, but can impart something from their own professional experience, which they can take back into their own practice.
I recently completed my PhD, supported by a fellowship from the Irish Hospice Foundation and the Health Research Board of Ireland. I cannot say how important it was to enable me to complete my studies. I think that nurses in particular always think these scholarships are out of the bounds of possibility for them. The palliative-care fellowship is hugely important and I would strongly encourage people to apply for it.
The other aspect of my working day is what you might call "community work"; that is, the support given to the local and wider community in respect of my specialist area of practice. In Ireland, this would involve supporting the local palliative care services in the western region (for example, I am sitting on a group planning a new hospice for
Co Mayo) or being part of a national palliative care group. I sit on the National Council for Palliative Care and I currently offer palliative care education expertise to a group developing a policy on paediatric palliative care in the Department of Health and Children.
Until very recently, I was vice-president of the European Association for Palliative Care based in Milan, so there was a considerable amount of travel involved. I keep saying it is getting quieter, but I am looking in my diary up to Christmas and I have meetings in Vienna, Sardinia, Rouen and Brussels. My day is sometimes very long.
At a more practical level, I am involved in the usual academic activities of setting exams and marking essays and papers. I have to say that, like most academics, this tends to be done in the evenings, but I am more fortunate than some of my colleagues in other departments, who can have 300-400 papers at one time.
I think you have to be passionate about teaching and I am passionate about palliative care. So I have the chance to not only shape how students learn about caring for someone who is dying but also how services in Ireland can be developed for the future. Not a bad place to be.
In conversation with Olivia Kelleher