Jan Lavrijsen found his passion and mission as a physician in Nursing Home Medicine, nowadays called Elderly Care Medicine. His expertise is on the long-term care, dilemmas and decision making at the end of someone’s life, especially concerning young patients who never regain consciousness after an acute brain injury. In this long-term care setting, trust in medical technology shifts to trusting physicians to make the right, though difficult, decisions.

Jan Lavrijsen is a lecturer  and senior researcher at the Department of Primary and Community Care,  at the Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre. He leads the research programme ‘Complex and Palliative Care’, in particular the group ‘Niemand tussen Wal en Schip’, dedicated to the severest outcomes of acquired brain injury. Jan Lavrijsen is a member of the European Task Force on Disorders of Consciousness, of the FORUM Centre for Ethics and Health and of several steering committees.

More about this speaker
Some interviews with Jan Lavrijsen (in Dutch) on vegetative state/unresponsive wakefulness syndrome:
http://www.wetenschap24.nl/programmas/labyrint/nieuws/2010/het-mysterie-coma/wie-waren-de-sprekers-in-de-aflevering-Het-mysterie-coma.html
http://www.wetenschap24.nl/programmas/labyrint/nieuws/2010/het-mysterie-coma/twittersessie–Het-mysterie-coma.html
http://www.ikonrtv.nl/daw/daw/index.asp?oId=2067

About the new name for vegetative state:
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/8/68/
http://medischcontact.artsennet.nl/nieuws-26/archief-6/tijdschriftartikel/87342/niemand-leeft-als-een-plant.htm (in Dutch)

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