Overview

The field of palliative care promises support for a dying person's physical, psychological, social, and spiritual needs, as well as the needs of family and community. Has this powerful vision been achieved? This state-of-the-field book argues that palliative care has drifted away from its transformative goals-and shows what to do about it. Bringing together leading international scholars and practitioners, Well-Being at the End of Life demonstrates how contemporary palliative care has slowly but surely strayed from its original values and practices. The provision of palliative care now reflects institutional, medicalized, and health-service priorities. Increasingly, it has become solely clinical, confined and constrained by clinical service considerations and limitations. Those at the end of life are all too often viewed as patients to be treated instead of people with whom care providers must create collaboration, participation, and partnerships. Contributors call for a paradigm shift in the values and priorities of palliative care to emphasize the importance of community to personal well-being. Drawing on the concept of health promotion, they advance a shared vision that merges the principles of public health with those of palliative care. Reimagining the field to foreground compassion and interdependence, Well-Being at the End of Life offers a new approach that puts community and professional partnerships at the heart of its practice.

Full Product Details

9780231216289

Table of Contents

Reviews

Well-written, accessible, and inspiring. This book will be of immense value to palliative care professionals and to others who work with aged populations. -- Ellen L. Idler, editor of <i>Religion as a Social Determinant of Public Health</i> This groundbreaking book offers a rigorously academic yet profoundly human framework centering social and spiritual dimensions of end-of-life experience. Moving beyond medicalized models, it reclaims something essential about being human; how we live, who we love, and where we belong are as medically significant as any drug we might prescribe. -- BJ Miller, coauthor of <i>A Beginner's Guide to the End: Practical Advice for Living Life and Facing Death</i>

Well-written, accessible, and inspiring. This book will be of immense value to palliative care professionals and to others who work with aged populations. -- Ellen L. Idler, editor of <i>Religion as a Social Determinant of Public Health</i>

Well-written, accessible, and inspiring, this book will be of immense value to palliative care professionals and to others who work with aged populations. -- Ellen L. Idler, editor of <i>Religion as a Social Determinant of Public Health</i> This groundbreaking book offers a rigorously academic yet profoundly human framework centering social and spiritual dimensions of end-of-life experience. Moving beyond medicalized models, it reclaims something essential about being human; how we live, whom we love, and where we belong are as medically significant as any drug we might prescribe. -- BJ Miller, coauthor of <i>A Beginner's Guide to the End: Practical Advice for Living Life and Facing Death</i> For decades, societies have responded to aging populations by medicalizing the end of life. This book provides an important alternative: a public health approach to the end of life. -- Luc Deliens, president of Public Health Palliative Care International

Author Information

Julian Abel is a palliative care physician and visiting professor at Northumbria University. Allan Kellehear is professor of end-of-life care at Northumbria University. Abel and Kellehear are cofounders of Compassionate Communities UK and coeditors of the Oxford Textbook of Public Health Palliative Care (2022).

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