#169 Stronger Together: Breaking Silos in Health, Law and Social Welfare with Dr Colette Hawkins

Dr Colette Hawkins is an Academic Consultant in Palliative Medicine at University Hospital Tees,  and an Honorary Clinical Senior Lecturer at Newcastle University.

Motivated to understand more deeply what it means to live with a serious illness, and how to deliver the care people really want, Colette began a series of research studies. Our conversation explores the catalyst to this, identifies what the research found and Colette shares the next steps of her innovative work.

This episode has been kindly supported by the Living Well Dying Well Trust. The creation, development and content of the episode remains the responsibility of Clare Fuller.

Key messages

• Colette’s shift from clinical consultant to academic palliative medicine

• The reality that medicine often ignores psychosocial and relational aspects of eating

• The importance of stories to bring lived experience into teaching

• Identification of a “knowledge to practice gap” in end of life education

• Exploration of where law fits into end of life care and serious illness

• Distinction between health/care decision law and social welfare legal issues

• Deep inequalities when serious illness meets poverty and disadvantage

• Carers’ heavy burden and difficulty navigating fragmented systems

• Development of Roots to Rights as an overarching programme and website

• Focus on social welfare law, rights, entitlements and “we don’t know what we don’t know”

• The importance of health literacy and accessible, understandable information

• Establishment of End of Life Learning Hub CIC to take this work forward

  • Core message: we are stronger together, and must break down silos through collaboration

Resource

• Access Routes to Rights 

• Read: Legal needs of adults with life-limiting illness: what are they and how are they managed? A qualitative multiagency stakeholder exercise

• Read: Marie Curie Dying In Poverty 2024

Bio

Dr Colette Hawkins is an Academic Consultant in Palliative Medicine at University Hospital Tees and an Honorary Clinical Senior Lecturer at Newcastle University. She previously worked for many years as a clinical consultant across North‑East England before taking an academic portfolio, driven by a commitment to understand more deeply what it means to live with serious illness and how to deliver the care people actually want.

This led her to establish Routes to Rights, a national multi‑agency research programme exploring how the law supports people with serious illness and those who care for them. This led to a professional education programme and a suite of public‑facing information resources.

Colette is an experienced educator who designs and facilitates learning founded on stories of lived experience, helping clinicians to bridge the gap between what they know and what they do. Her next venture is the End of Life Learning Hub CIC, a Community Interest Company dedicated to helping the public understand what they can, and should, expect around end of life, and providing practice‑changing multi-agency professional learning.

Follow her on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/colette-hawkins-a3193274