Cameron's Arc: Creating a Full Life

Cameron’s Arc is designed to train health care professionals, including primary care pediatricians, on how to provide compassionate, family-centered care, including palliative care, to seriously ill children and their family. It explores effective parent-professional communication across four critical points in the care of a seriously ill child. Each section explores one of these junctures in a way that is attentive to the family experience and is an opportunity for the pediatrician to act on a commitment to the patient and family. At these critical points in time, an unmet need is recognized, the need is understood and met by the timely provision of an appropriate resource, and the result is a deeper connection between the parents and doctor.

Divided into 5 short clips, the film portrays how sensitive, family-centered care was delivered by a community pediatrician when he diagnosed one of his patients with Tay Sachs disease.

Cameron’s Arc will introduce you to a family who had the support and care of their child’s primary physician, Richard Goldstein, MD, FAAP, from the beginning of the difficult journey, all the way through end-of-life, supplemented by specialists when needed. The story of this pediatrician and this family speaks to a basic element of doctoring—compassion and the ideals that lead people to take on the care of vulnerable lives for a career. The film is meant to stimulate reflection and discussion of the intense moments that go into successfully caring for a child and family, even, and perhaps especially, when the expected outcome is death

Cameron’s Arc includes a Teaching and Resource Guide, which includes learning guides, discussion questions, additional resources, and supplemental information on hospice care.