The textbook, details of which are available on the Oxford University Press website, has over 200 contributors, with its five international editors “guarantee[ing] a truly global perspective.”
The editors, Nathan Cherny (Israel), David C. Currow (Australia), Marie Fallon (UK), Stein Kaasa (Norway) and Russell K. Portenoy (US), published three articles on the OUP blog earlier this month to mark the new edition’s launch.
The first blog is entitled ‘Continuity’ deals with the values that healthcare professionals working in palliative care display. The authors argue that “the factors motivating palliative medicine practitioners are the underlying axioms of our professional endeavours,” before explaining in detail the relation of concepts such as resilience, compassion and courage to palliative care.
In the second blog the authors focus on ‘Development’, discussing how best to train professionals across the world in palliative care. While acknowledging that there has been good progress in many countries on this issues, the authors claim that “much more needs to be done to introduce palliative care into the curriculum of every specialty that provides care to populations with serious or life-threatening illness.”
The final blog centres on ‘Evolution’, looking at the new opportunities and forms of technology that are available to aid palliative care today. This, however, comes with a series of new “tensions and dilemmas” for healthcare professionals; the authors highlight that, for many, “the worry is that palliative care is being excessively ‘medicalised’ or ‘professionalised’.”
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