This book offers an overview of key aspects of palliative care, presented through a resilience perspective. Why do some patients and families break down while others surmount the challenges facing them? What interventions strengthen individual, family and community coping? The book aims to facilitate change with people facing the crisis of death, dying, and bereavement. Much of the existing literature has focused on risk, problems, and vulnerability; the emerging concept of resilience focuses on strengths and possibilities. The ‘total pain’/‘total care’ approach pioneered by Dame Cicely Saunde ... More

This book offers an overview of key aspects of palliative care, presented through a resilience perspective. Why do some patients and families break down while others surmount the challenges facing them? What interventions strengthen individual, family and community coping? The book aims to facilitate change with people facing the crisis of death, dying, and bereavement. Much of the existing literature has focused on risk, problems, and vulnerability; the emerging concept of resilience focuses on strengths and possibilities. The ‘total pain’/‘total care’ approach pioneered by Dame Cicely Saunders and St Christopher's Hospice now needs reinterpreting in the light of changing contexts and challenges. The realities of demographic change and resource-constrained health and social care environments have generated an increasingly risk focused approach to service delivery. A narrowly medicalised approach has inevitable limitations: professional care alone will be unable to meet need and demand in the face of ageing populations, changing patterns of illness and the need for equity. The resilience approach offers a counterbalance that harnesses the strengths of individuals and the communities in which they live and in which most of their dying will take place. Resilience thinking emphasises the importance of public health and creates a partnership between patients, professionals, and community structures, seeking to build community capacity and to deliver a preventive health care that will leave future generations less afraid of the dying and bereavement that will confront all of us.