Watson Max (EDT) - Oxford Handbook of Palliative Care

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Palliative care has a unique balance of professional, emotional, and existential issues. All are necessary to guide our patients through the last stages of their lives, and poetry can be an excellent reflection of this.

We introduce this new edition with the challenge of the poem Dont Tell Me, written by a UK palliative care consultant under her pseudonym, Jo Hansen.

Dont tell me, He was a good old age I know that.

Dont tell me, it was great that you were all there I know that too.

Dont tell me, with time this will pass I didnt ask if it would.

Words belittle the enormity,

The aching deepness of existence

And loss.

Dont say anything at all

Please, just be there.

Jo Hansen 2017

I am always willing to learn, however I do not always like to be taught.

Winston Churchill

The first edition of the Oxford Handbook of Palliative Care has been warmly received. We have been encouraged by colleagues to make the material presented here more relevant to non-medical readers. We therefore welcome to our team, Jo Wells, who is a nurse consultant in palliative care. We have added new sections on antibiotics, increased emphasis on non-malignant disease, learning disabilities, palliative care in developing countries and communication. All the chapters of the first edition have been reviewed and many have been completely rewritten.

We hope that the result will be a Handbook which that is useful to the whole of the multiprofessional team and will achieve a better balance than its predecessor. Although the Handbook is somewhat larger than the first edition, we feel that this is a reflection of the rapid changes and progress of this field of clinical practice in a relatively short period.