Pittwater Life June 2018 Issue

Duty
of Care
Life Stories
First-hand experience led former
Pittwater Councillor Kay Millar on a
quest to ensure our local area gained
much-needed inpatient palliative care.
Story by Rosamund Burton
“My husband died aged 38 from
bowel cancer,” Kay Millar
says. It was only six weeks
from Bill Millar’s diagnosis to death. The
couple had been married three years, and
had an 18-month old son and Kay’s twin
daughters from her previous marriage.
The big man, who used to fill their home
with laughter, faded away. Eventually he
became so weak Kay was unable to get
him to the bathroom, so she rang Mona
Vale Hospital and asked to bring him in.
She was told that he would have to go to a
palliative care unit at either Wahroonga or
Greenwich.
“I was so stressed out I was
hallucinating when I was driving,” she
explains. The thought of travelling to the
North Shore with three children during his
final days was unthinkable. Fortunately,
an oncologist friend of hers had the
foresight just to ring an ambulance. It took
Bill to Mona Vale Hospital where he died
two days later, on New Year’s Day, 1983.
It was during a chance conversation 30
years later with Jo-Ann Steeves, President
of the Friends of Northern Beaches Palliative
Care, when Kay learnt that Cora
Adcock Palliative Care Cottage, on the
Mona Vale Hospital grounds, only provides
outpatient services. Like many Northern
Beaches residents, she assumed it took patients
overnight, and only discovered then
there still wasn’t that facility at Mona Vale.
“I couldn’t believe it. I thought, ‘This
could be me all over again – not having
somewhere for my husband to go for those
last few days.’”
Kay Millar had become a Pittwater
councillor in 2012, and in July 2014 she
brought a Notice of Motion for an inpatient
palliative care unit on the Northern
Beaches. A unit had been approved in
the mid-1990s, but with a change of
government it never eventuated.
With the new Northern Beaches Hospital
opening scheduled for October, it was the
ideal time to earmark part of the Mona
Vale Hospital site for sub-acute care. A
working group was formed in 2014, which
included retired palliative care physician,
Dr Yvonne McMaster; Dr Phillip Macaulay,
current palliative care physician, nurses,
Eileen Gordon and Gail Carew and Kylie
Ferguson, a previous Pittwater Councillor
and now Northern Beaches Councillor;
Jo-Ann Steeves, and HammondCare
community nurses based in Cora Adcock
Cottage. Local MP Rob Stokes has also
provided a staff member to support the
group.
Deb Willcox, CEO of Northern Sydney
Local Health District, recently asked the
working group to write a wish list for the
unit, so members of the working group
are visiting and talking to directors of
other units in Sydney about possible
options such as a treatment room offering
massage therapy and spa baths, a large
communal kitchen, and even some rooms
with double beds.
“The working group has pushed
for the unit to be site-specific, taking
advantage of the ocean view and the north
easterly breeze,” Kay explains, “and we’re
advocating that every room has access to
a deck, and that the bed can be pushed
out onto it. As a Northern Beaches resident
30 JUNE 2018
The Local Voice Since 1991