Carlo Leget
Carlo Leget (1964) studied theology at the Catholic Theological University at Utrecht (1982-1989 cum laude) and published his PhD-thesis on life and death in the work of Thomas Aquinas in 1997. Working as a research fellow and assistant professor of moral theology (1998-2002) he became involved in research on end-of-life care. From 2002-2008 he worked as an assistant professor of Medical Ethics at the Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Center. From 2009-2012 he worked at Tilburg University as associate professor of Care Ethics. Since 2012 he is a full professor and chair of Care Ethics at the University of Humanistic Studies in Utrecht, the Netherlands (www.uvh.nl). At the same time, from 2012-2022, he held an endowed chair in ethical and spiritual questions in palliative care, established by the Association Hospice Care Netherlands and the Netherlands Comprehensive Cancer Organization (www.iknl.nl).
His academic works focuses on (care) ethics, meaning and spirituality in palliative care, and he is involved in many discussions in the Netherlands on end-of-life issues. From his empirical work in Dutch nursing homes, he developed a much-used model for spiritual care, known as the Diamond model, on which he wrote extensively in Dutch, and that has been integrated in the Utrecht Symptom Diary 4D. On the Diamond model he published Art of Living. Art of Dying. Spiritual Care for a Good Death (London/Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Publishers 2017).
For many years, Leget chaired the national working group on ‘Ethics and spiritual care’ in his country. He chaired the first national consensus-based guideline on spiritual care in palliative care (2010), and the first evidence base guideline on the same subject (2018). From 2011-2019 he was vice-president of the European Association for Palliative Care (EAPC), co-founded and chaired the EAPC-taskforce on spiritual care, and was a board member of Palliactief, the Dutch Association for Professional Palliative Care. Since 2015 he is a member of the Health Council in the Netherlands.
In 2023, together with Mai-Britt Guldin PhD, he founded the Center for Grief and Existential Values in Aarhus, Denmark (https://sorgogeksistens.dk). The Center works research based from an interdisciplinary and interprofessional perspective and develops research and education on loss and grief in relation to its existential core. Last year the Center published a paper on their approach to loss and grief: Guldin, M.-B., & Leget, C. (2023). The integrated process model of loss and grief - An interprofessional understanding. Death Studies, 48(7), 738–752. https://doi.org/10.1080/07481187.2023.2272960. In September 2024 a book on the model was published: Mai-Britt Guldin & Carlo Leget, Loss Grief and Existential Awareness: An Integrative Approach. Routledge 2024 (also available in Danish and Dutch).