This is a book about the public health approach within palliative care. Often when we think about ‘public health’ it is more usual to think about palliative care as part of the public health system—similar to the hospitals, nursing homes, community clinics but also the broader supports for population health such as sewerage and water purification systems or workplace health and safety. In universities, we often think of public health in terms of the surveillance sciences—epidemiology, health services research, computer modeling, or the bench sciences devoted to understanding disease. But in this volume of contributors, we are specifically addressing a newer and less recognized aspect of public health—public health practice methods such as education, health policy, community development, or social ecology. We are also specifically examining the role of the ‘new’ public health, sometimes also known as health promotion. Health promotion is a major departure from the emphases on surveillance, disease, and health services by placing its gaze and efforts on practice solutions, health and wellbeing, and community and civic involvement in healthcare—in this case, palliative care. This Oxford Textbook of Public health Palliative Care is an introduction to this dimension of practice.
The challenge for palliative care is to embrace a public health vision of practice. There is a necessity to shift from a service and clinical model of care for the dying and their caregivers, to a more inclusive model. This is a future model not merely defined by cause of death, age or diagnosis, but one that works for all people including those near and far, young and old, disadvantaged or disenfranchised, and in local or international settings. This is because the human impulse behind all care at the end of life is best realised through the social practice of compassion—a care for the other that is shared with others.