Sainsbury Chair of Palliative Medicine

“It is therefore suggested that the family charitable Trusts should combine to fund a new Chair/Department of Palliative Medicine at St Thomas' Hospital. Funding for the first 12 years would be sufficient to establish the department permanently.”

So wrote Hugh de Quetteville to Simon Sainsbury and the Trustees of The Monument Trust, to finalise support for a new Chair of Palliative Medicine in 1989. The Monument award joined funds from The Alan and Babette Sainsbury Charitable Fund, The Gatsby Charitable Foundation, The Headley Trust, The Kay Kendall Leukaemia Fund and The Linbury Trust.

The note continued: “A man of recognised distinction has been identified as the first professor to lead the new department.”

Credit: Royal Trinity Hospice

That man was Geoffrey Hanks, who was already a pioneer – in 1983 he’d been appointed as the first Consultant in Palliative Medicine at the Royal Marsden Hospital. He was then appointed in 1991 to the Sainsbury Chair of Palliative Medicine at the University of London, based at St Thomas’ Hospital. It was a landmark position and Hanks, always known as Geoff, drove development of this nascent area of medicine.

Whilst in the role, he played a key role in the decision of the (then) Macmillan Cancer Relief Fund to fund the formal training of doctors in this specialism. He worked with the assistance of palliative care pioneer Cicely Saunders. The Trustees of The Elizabeth Clark Charitable Trust, themselves experienced in this area, monitored the project for the family.

Unfortunately, Geoff left for the University of Bristol in 1993 to head his own department as Professor of Palliative Medicine. The second Sainsbury Professor of Palliative Medicine was Mike Richards, appointed in 1995, who went on to become National Cancer Director.

The aim of creating this Chair at St Thomas’ was to develop academic and clinical appreciation of the value of palliative care beyond hospices. There are now more than 450 specialist care consultants and registrars, several professors, and this important stratum of medicine is taught in all medical schools.

The Elizabeth Clark Charitable Trust, now closed, was a great supporter of other palliative care work. This included the outstanding Royal Trinity Hospice, which provides specialist palliative and end-of-life care to people in central and southwest London living in their own homes, and at their state-of-the-art inpatient unit on the edge of Clapham Common.