World's longest-serving hospice doctor honoured

20 July 2006

Award: Doctor Mary Baines

A MEDICAL pioneer who helped set up groundbreaking hospice services has won an international award for humanitarian work.

Dr Mary Baines, who worked at St Christopher's Hospice in Sydenham for nearly 30 years, received her European Women of Achievement Award last Friday.

She studied medicine alongside Dame Cicely Saunders, who founded the hospice and invited her to join in 1968.

At first, Dr Baines refused, but then changed her mind and spent a revolutionary career at the centre.

She said: "Obviously, I was very pleased about the award. I've been a doctor in a hospice longer than anybody in the world. For many, at the beginning of the hospice, there was no doubt it was a spiritual calling. But it was a bit scary! I said in the acceptance speech it was professional suicide because it was completely out of step. No one had ever done it apart from Cicely."

St Christopher's was initially set up as an in-patient unit, but staff then established the first home care service for the terminally ill in the late 1960s.

Their work was the foundation for thousands of hospices throughout the world.

Dr Baines is now involved in setting up centres in Africa and Eastern Europe.

"My passion is hospice in the poorest parts of the world," she said. "In many of these countries nearly all the patients present too late for curative treatment and so instead need palliative care."

She has also worked at the Ellenor Foundation, which covers Dartford, Gravesend and Bexley, and was a GP for 10 years before joining St Christopher's.

The pioneer added: "It's been an enormous medical challenge. St Christopher's brought together for the first time in history a large number of people who were dying of advanced cancer.

"Prior to that they would have been scattered, so as well as caring for them it gave people like me the opportunity to study them and do quite important research, for example into different pain killers"

She says religious faith and fulfilment from her job have helped her cope with the difficult emotions her work involves.

"Satisfaction in a job depends on the distance between what you want to achieve and what you do achieve," she said. "If that distance is very big then you find it very stressful.

"In hospice care you're not looking any more at curing these patients. I know quite well it's impossible to cure them. My major interest is to see their symptoms are well controlled and to enable them to come to terms with the situation and share it with their families. Nearly always you can come near to achieving that.

"As a Christian I believe death is not the end. It's like the end of a chapter but the book goes on. That has certainly helped me.