Death, dying, loss, and care giving are not just medical issues, but societal ones.

Palliative care has become increasingly professionalised, focused around symptom science. With this emphasis on minimizing the harms of physical, psychological, and spiritual stress, there has been a loss of how cultures and communities look after their dying, with the wider social experience of death often sidelined in the professionalisation and medicalisation of care. However, the people we know and love in the places we know and love make up what matters most for those undergoing the experiences of death, loss, and care giving.

Over the last 25 years the theory, practice, research evidence base, and clinical applications have developed, generating widespread adoption of the principles of public health approaches to palliative care. The essential principles of prevention, harm reduction, early intervention, and health and wellbeing promotion can be applied to the universal experience of end of life, irrespective of disease or diagnosis. Compassionate communities have become a routine part of the strategy and service development in palliative care, both within the UK and internationally.

The Oxford Textbook of Public Health Palliative Care provides a reframing of palliative care, bringing together the full scope of theory, practice, and evidence into one volume. Written by international leaders in the field, it provides the first truly comprehensive and authoritative textbook on the subject that will help to further inform developments in this growing specialty.

About the Author:
Julian Abel, Director, Compassionate Communities, UK, Allan Kellehear, Clinical Professor, College of Nursing and Health Sciences, University of Vermont, USA

Dr Julian Abel became a consultant in palliative care in 2001. He was the chair of the organising committee for the 4th International Public Health and Palliative Care Conference in 2015 and was Vice President of Public Health Palliative Care International. Since 2016 he has worked with Frome Medical Practice in Somerset in developing a new model of primary care combined with compassionate communities. He is co-author of The Compassion Project which describes the background to the Frome Project and the implications of compassion in medicine and in society at large. Along with Dr Kellehear and Dr Catherine Millington Sanders he formed Compassionate Communities UK, of which he is Director. The charity has been formed to develop broader roll-out of compassionate communities in both primary care and end of life care. Dr Abel also runs a podcast, Survival of the Kindest, about compassion and its absence.

Dr Allan Kellehear is Clinical Professor in the College of Nursing and Health Sciences at the University of Vermont, USA. He was formerly 50th Anniversary Professor (End of Life Care) at the University of Bradford in the UK. He has previously held chairs in social sciences, public health, or palliative care at Middlesex, Bath, Tokyo, and La Trobe Universities. He has held honorary professorships in Austria, Australia, Canada, China, Ireland, Japan, United Kingdom, and the USA. He is internationally acknowledged to be the leading academic proponent of health-promoting palliative care and the compassionate communities/cities movement.