Ira Byock, M.D.
Program Director
ibyock@aol.com
406.243.6601

Dr. Byock has been involved in hospice and palliative care since 1978. At that time he helped found a hospice home care program for the indigent population served by the university hospital and county clinics of Fresno, California. He is a Past President of the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine (1997) and was the recipient of the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization prestigious Person of the Year award in 1995, and the National Coalition of Cancer Survivorship's Natalie Davis Springarn Writer's Award in 2000.

Dr. Byock is a frequent workshop and keynote presenter at state, regional, national and international meetings. He has published numerous articles on the ethics and practice of end-of-life care. He serves on numerous advisory committees and the editorial boards of several professional publications, including the Journal of Palliative Medicine. His book Dying Well (Putman/Riverside, 1997) has become a core reading on the subject. He has co-authored A Few Months to Live (Georgetown University Press, 2001) and co-edited Palliative and End-of-Life Pearls (Hanley & Belfus, 2002), a collection of clinical case studies. His latest book, The Four Things That Matter Most, is written for the general public and was published in 2004 by The Free Press, a division of Simon & Schuster.

In addition to directing the Promoting Excellence in End-of-Life Care national program, Byock is Professor of Anesthesiology and Community Family Medicine at Dartmouth Medical School, and is the Director of Palliative Medicine at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center.

For more details, visit Dr. Byock's web site, Dying Well (www.dyingwell.org).

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Promoting Excellence in End-of-Life Care was a national program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation dedicated to long-term changes in health care institutions to substantially improve care for dying people and their families.