Palliative care is spreading beyond its original hospice base to encompass care in the community, in hospitals, health centres, clinics and nursing homes. 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? Addressing many such issues, this book, 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.