Palliative Day Care in Practice

This edited book provides a comprehensive overview of the current philosophy, patterns and policies of palliative day care. It places emphasis on the need to evaluate performance in palliative day care. Audit, health economics and research in palliative day care, and their associated problems and pitfalls, are therefore described. Day care for people with advanced diseases is one of the most rapidly expanding components of palliative care in the UK, and is increasingly a focus of new service development throughout the world. Many benefits, in terms of quality of life, holistic care for the patient and family and increased time at home are claimed by day care. Palliative Day Care in Practice provides a comprehensive overview of the current philosophy, patterns and policies of palliative day care. It places emphasis on the need to evaluate performance in palliative day care and describes in detail aspects such as audit, hea;th economics, research and their associated problems and pitfalls. For readers new to the field it aims to survey the broad concepts and components of palliative day care and the philosophies and practical issues that relate to them. For those more experienced in the field, it seeks to highlight some of the questions, challenges and dilemmas that palliative day care services face and which will need to be addressed in the years ahead. It will prove valuable to specialist palliative care practitioners, researchers and purchasers interested in establishing or evaluating palliative day care.