Dr Andrew Skeels, the former long-time medical director of Clare Holland House, says he is ambivalent about any introduction of euthanasia to Australia but is clear about one thing.
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"I think the palliative care services in Canberra are as good as anywhere in Australia and better than most of the places,'' he said.
Dr Skeels, 62, has been made a member of the Order of Australia in the Queen's birthday honours list for significant service to medicine, particularly in the field of palliative care.
"I'm really pretty proud to be perfectly honest,'' he said, of the honour.
"I'm amazed. It's not something I was expecting.''
Originally from Melbourne, he moved to Canberra in 2001 as medical director of Palliative Care Services for Calvary Health Care. That put him in charge of the much-loved and much-respected hospice, Clare Holland House, and it was a position he held until 2017.
Dr Skeels, a father-of-three, said the greatest lesson he has learn from palliative care and the aspect he had enjoyed most in his medical career was being able to understand a situation from a patient's perspective.
"Learn to walk in their shoes and see the world in their eyes and that's very different to a lot of other areas of medicine and it took a long, long time for me to learn that,'' he said.
Originally working in geriatrics medicine in Victoria, Dr Skeels became interested in palliative care in the midst of the dying with dignity debate.
"I had an interest in that as a concept and as part of that became aware we didn't actually do a very good job looking after people who were dying, because we just didn't have the skills or knowledge to put it together,'' he said.
He trained in palliative medicine at the Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney in the mid-1990s and was medical director at Calvary Health Care Bethlehem in Melbourne before coming to Canberra.
Dr Skeels, now retired, says he believes palliative care medicine has improved. But he agrees more education is required of practitioners, especially in the area of communication with patients and families.
"It's still very hit and miss and some people are very good at it and some people who, despite lots of training, are still not very good at it. I think we've got quite a long way to go,'' he said.
Dr Skeels said palliative care was also having to cope with not just being cancer-centric, but needed to become a discipline that dealt with patients with chronic conditions where care could continue for years.
"We are often called in sometimes at a very early stage after the diagnosis to help with symptom control, setting up goals of care and working in conjunction with a team,'' he said.
Dr Skeels also believed more resources being devoted to palliative care should be a debate separate from the euthanasia question and not an either/or situation.
