Below are the major publications that relate to the palliative care field.

Oxford Textbook of Palliative Social Work
The Oxford Textbook of Palliative Social Work joins the Oxford Textbooks of Medicine and Nursing, firmly establishing social work as a palliative care core discipline. In this important new resource, over 130 authors explore palliative social work across diagnoses, clinical settings, and in different countries and cultures. The chapters integrate theory, evidence and best practices to help readers capture and fully appreciate the breadth and depth of the patient and family experience. The book is published at a time of great energy and enthusiasm for the prospects of palliative care as well as a time of enormous challenges for clinicians, health care institutions and policy makers.

This valuable resource invites the thousands of social workers who practice in diverse settings to embrace the synergy of palliative care and social work principles to enrich care. It validates the opportunities for palliative social work to influence the systems, institutions and teams that serve patients and families. The rich narratives, scope of topics and focus on collaboration across disciplines makes this Textbook an important resource for all of us who share in the care for this very special population of patients and their loved ones.

—Diane E. Meier, MD, FACP

Geriatric Palliative Care, Oxford University press 2003, Eds R. Sean Morrison and Diane E. Meier
Geriatric Palliative Care covers a broad spectrum of issues characterizing care near the end of life for older adults. Beginning with the social and cultural context of old age and frailty, this volume details specific aspects of palliative care relevant to particular disorders (e.g. cancer, strokes, dementia, etc.) as well as individual symptoms (e.g., pain, fatigue, anxiety, etc.). Communication between care-givers and patients, in a variety of settings, is also discussed.

Accounting for the Costs of Caring through the End of Life--Promoting Excellence
This monograph addresses the challenges in assessing the costs of end-of-life care and the issues in designing evaluations and computing cost in an accurate and comprehensive fashion. It presents cautions for interpreting the results of economic research into end-of-life care and offers guidelines for designing studies that can yield results that are meaningful for programmatic quality improvement and health care policy. Recommendations contained in the report are intended to help those involved in health care research and clinical program evaluation to gather useful data, and increase the number of studies that meet minimum criteria for analysis and comparisons.

Advanced Practice Nursing: Pioneering Practices in Palliative Care
This monograph illustrates successful models of pioneers in advanced practice nursing and promotes the advanced practice nurse's role in providing palliative care.

Completing the Continuum of ALS Care--Promoting Excellence: A Consensus Document
This monograph is a compilation of recommendations to the field which address different aspects of care through the end of life for patients with ALS and their families. Recommendations are focused in the areas of psychosocial care, bereavement, spirituality, quality of life, ethics, communication and decision making, access to care, cost of care, family support, and physician knowledge and education. Recommendations are also included for symptom management in ALS, issues of life completion and closure and medical management during the last days and hours of life. These recommendations describe steps needed to improve palliative care for ALS patients. Click on the following link to get toPromoting Excellence in End of Life Care website where you can download a PDF version of this monograph.

Financial Implications of Promoting Excellence in End-of-Life Care
This monograph features six innovative demonstration projects that successfully provide concurrent life extending and palliative care for patients with chronic and life-limiting illnesses. These projects not only demonstrate the feasibility of this approach and its acceptability to patients and clinicians; they also show its potential for containing costs. The full monograph offers snapshots of new models for delivering palliative care that are designed to fit within existing systems and settings of care. An executive summary briefly describes the design of each project and cost savings for the health care system.

Living and Dying Well With Cancer: Successfully Integrating Palliative Care and Cancer Care Treatment
In the past several years, the Institute of Medicine and professional associations in oncology have put forth a new and hopeful vision for improving the comfort and quality of life for patients with advanced cancer and their families. This vision foresees a continuum of cancer care that integrates two seemingly disparate models of care - aggressive cancer treatment and palliative care - and eliminates the "terrible choice" between life-prolongation and quality of life that is currently imposed on patients and providers alike. This monograph reports on the hopeful results of demonstration projects in four leading cancer centers, each awarded grants from Promoting Excellence in End-of-Life Care, a national program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Palliative Care Academic Career Awards: A Public-Private Partnership to Improve Care for the Most Vulnerable (PDF)
Developed by CAPC and the International Longevity Center-USA, this report provides a blueprint for a nationwide palliative care faculty development initiative and proposes a public-private effort to build a national cadre of academic medical school faculty who will educate all physicians-in-training on the principles of palliative care.

Oncology for Palliative Medicine
A unique text in that it covers oncology for palliative medicine and is aimed primarily at providing a perspective on oncology for the palliative care professional. The new edition continues to focus on the advanced stages of malignancy and recurrent malignancy, providing an overview of the main primary sites of cancer, and describing the disease and patterns of progression together with the common approaches to treatment. The book will help the reader to identify opportunities for active palliative care and discusses the key factors that may influence treatment discussions.

Palliative Care Perspectives
A new book on palliative care titled, "Palliative Care Perspectives," written by Dr. James Hallenbeck, is now available from Oxford Press. This book serves as an introduction to palliative care for both physicians and non-physicians. Drawing on his personal experience as a clinician and educator, Dr. Hallenbeck addresses a range of topics from an overview on death and dying in the modern world to discussions of very practical issues in the practice of palliative care, including pain and symptom management, communication skills and the art of the palliative care consult. To order the book, call: 1-800-451-7556.

Annotated Bibliography on Instruments to Measure Care at the End of Life
An authoritative bibliography of instruments to measure the quality of care and quality of life for dying patients and their families.

Wall of Silence: The Untold Story of the Medical Mistakes that Kill and Injure Millions of Americans, LifeLine Press 2003, Rosemary Gibson and Janardan Prasad Singh
This book goes behind the scenes to expose how medical mistakes plague our health care system. To order this book click on the link above to get to the LifeLine Press website.

TriCentral Care Program
A Program Toolkit giving you a step-by-step guide on how you can create an innovative outpatient palliative care program within your own healthcare institution.

Pioneer Programs in Palliative Care
Pioneer Programs in Palliative Care: Nine Case Studies by the Milbank Memorial Fund, Co-published with The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, 2000, 240 pages