Oxford Textbook of Public Health Palliative Care

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.

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.

Part 1 : The Case for Public Health Palliative Care
1. Demographic and Epidemiological Challenges, Julia Verne
2. International Palliative Care Policy, Philip Larkin
3. The Social Nature of Dying and The Social Model of Health, Allan Kellehear
4. Palliative Care: The New Essentials, Julian Abel, Allan Kellehear, and Aliki Karapliagou
Part 2 : Basic Concepts and Theory
5. A History of Public Health Palliative Care, Bruce Rumbold
6. The 'New' Public Health: A social model of care, Mark Spreckley and Allan Kellehear
7. Health and Wellbeing, Julian Abel
8. Prevention and Harm-Reduction, Libby Sallnow
9. Early Intervention, John Rosenberg
10. Participatory Relations, Kerrie Noonan
Part 3 : Basic Practice Methods
11. Community Development - Compassionate communities, Manjula Patel and Kerrie Noonan
12. Compassionate Cities: A social ecology at the end of life, Gail Wilson, Emilio Herrera, Silvia Librada, and Allan Kellehear
13. Developing End of Life Literacy through Public Education, Rebecca M. Patterson and Mark A. Hazelwood
14. Health Policy, Katherine Pettus and Pati Dzotsenidze
15. Health Promotion and Palliative care, Andrea Grindrod
16. Clinical Practice Methods with Community Resources, Helen Kingston, Catherine Millington-Sanders, and Julian Abel
17. Digital Applications and Public Health Palliative Care, Jason Mills and Shyla Mills
Part 4 : Population based approaches
18. Health Services Redesign, Emma Hodges and Nikki Archer
19. Public Health Approaches to Bereavement and Loss, Samar Aoun and Bruce Rumbold
20. Public Health Palliative Care, Equity-Oriented Care, and Structural Vulnerability, Holly Prince, Kathy Kortes-Miller, Kelli Stajduhar, and Denise Marshall
21. Public Health Palliative Care Design and Practice in Low- and Middle-Income Countries, Suresh Kumar and Kamala Ramakrishnan
Part 5 : Evidence-Base
22. The Evidence for the Effectiveness of a Public Health Palliative Care Approach, Joseph Sawyer and Libby Sallnow
23. The Evidence for the Importance of Naturally Occurring Networks, Rosemary Leonard and Debbie Horsfall
24. Complexities and Challenges in a Public Health Palliative Care Research, Steven Vanderstichelen and Luc Deliens.
25. Economic Perspectives on Public Health Approaches to Palliative Care, Charles Normand
Part 6: Education and Training
26. Pedagogic Approaches for Professional Learning, Mary Hodgson and Heather Richardson.
27. Public Health Palliative Care Education: Children and Schools, Sally Paul
28. Specialist Training: The UK Palliative Medicine Curriculum, Polly Edmonds
29. Using and Building Toolkits to Support Community Action, Bonnie Tompkins and Dan Malleck
Part 7: Conclusion and Appendices
Conclusion, Julian Abel & Allan Kellehear
Appendix A: The Compassionate City Charter- A Charter of Actions
Appendix B: Useful Organisational Links