Working to improve End of Life Care
THE DISTANT VOICES
WHO ARE WE: We're a group of distant voices... for one reason or another we're unheard. We're disabled. We're elderly. We're terminally ill. Mentally ill. Learning disabled. OR we're able bodied, young--healthy, but with the sense to know it'll all change one day. Everyone gets old, everyone dies. Cheery, I know.
The point is how we treat our vulnerable in hospital effects all of us, whether we realize it or not. They're our friends. Our family. They're us.
We started in 2009 and we've not stopped since. It all began when Nikki Kenward performed a piece on the 4th Plinth in Trafalgar Square about euthanasia. There were only four of us back then. But that day we met some really interesting organisations who agreed with us. Now we're a research organisation. We work with expert in their field to learn the ins and out of this subject matter, and then we get out there and try to spread the message using art and protest. In 2013 we took a play by Nikki on the road nationwide, TRUST, a docu-drama about an avoidable death in hospital. In 2015, we took the Director of Public Prosecutions before the High Court for making it easier to assist in a suicide without parlimentary process. Outside we performed street theatre with 20 foot puppets before hundreds of people. One of our puppets, the judge also made his debut TV appearance at the Assisted Dying Bill protest in 2015. We get about. Two of our senior members are trustees for the Schindler Award, which rewards whistle blowers in hospitals.
We make no money for what we do. We do it because we care.
HELLO
WELCOME TO DISTANT VOICES.
DISTANT VOICES EXISTS : To help you understand the issues, problems, facts and fictions about assisted suicide and euthanasia. It’s a site that aims at asking you to ‘think again’ once you have more information. In talking to people we have found that the option of assisted suicide is in general thought to be an easy and uncomplicated choice--DIGNITY IN DYING certainly see things in this way--but as in the whole of life things are rarely that simple.
Take a look around and find out ‘everything they didn’t tell you and everything you were afraid to ask.’