The acute care conveyor belt: a personal experience

doi: 10.5694/mja16.00016 to die of?”. Every stage of life has now become medicalised, not just birth and death. The fact that there is even a conveniently euphemistic acronym for the end of life, “EOL”, rather than the words themselves, is symptomatic of how removedwe are as a profession from the reality that despite our very best efforts, life has only one ultimate outcome. But Hillman and colleagues’ description of the “acute care conveyor belt” eloquently describes the path that I impotently watched my father travel.