Emphasising the multi-disciplinary nature of palliative care, the fourth edition of this text also looks at the individual professional roles that contribute to the best-quality palliative care.

This volume, developed by the Observatory together with OECD, provides an overall conceptual framework for understanding and applying strategies aimed at improving quality of care. Crucially, it summarizes available evidence on different quality strategies and provides recommendations for their implementation. This book is intended to help policy-makers to understand concepts of quality and to support them to evaluate single strategies and combinations of strategies.

Clinical audit is now an integral part of the practice of doctors, nurses, social workers and others who work in hospitals or the community. However, in palliative care, where quality is paramount, audit has been hampered by the lack of sensitive methods and measures. This study brings together methods and experiences in practising audit from the United Kingdom, Ireland and Canada to show how audit in this crucial area of care can be provided.

Palliative care is moving through an important period of expansion and development, spreading beyond its original hospice base to encompass care in the community, in hospitals, health centres, clinics and nursing homes. It can now be found in over 70 countries of the world. What challenges does this multidisciplinary speciality face as it seeks to combine high grade pain and symptom control with sensitive psychological, spiritual and social care? What are the implications of current constraints on health policy and planning? How do ethical issues about resource allocation and end of life care impinge? Can palliative care be further extended to include conditions other than cancer? New Themes in Palliative Care addresses these and many related issues in ways which will be readily accessible to students of health and social care as well as to those involved in purchasing or providing palliative care services, and to social scientists interested in chronic illness, death and dying. Its editors are respected experts in the field with backgrounds in the social sciences, nursing and medicine and the book's contributors include leading international figures from a wide range of palliative care and academic disciplines.

Aimed at those working in community care, including doctors, nurses, nursing students and social workers, this book covers the value of teamwork, stress issues in palliative care, communication, ethical dilemmas, transcultural and ethnic issues at the end of life, and sexuality in palliative care.

This book brings together a range of different experts to give a multidisciplinary perspective on recent changes in the health service. It focuses particularly on the effect of those changes for community nurses and their clients. The practical implications are always to the fore making this essential reading for community nurses and their management colleagues.

Clinical audit is at the heart of clinical governance. Provides the mechanisms for reviewing the quality of everyday care provided to patients with common conditions like asthma or diabetes. Builds on a long history of doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals reviewing case notes and seeking ways to serve their patients better. Addresses the quality issues systematically and explicitly, providing reliable information. Can confirm the quality of clinical services and highlight the need for improvement. Provides clear statements of principle about clinical audit in the NHS.