Edited by David Clark, Jo Hockley, Sam Ahmedzai

Open University Press

£45 (hardback) £15.99 (paperback)

ISBN 0 335 19606 3 (hardback)

0 335 19605 5 (paperback)

The 300 pages of this book are packed with information on international developments in palliative care. The editors and their 32 contributors are a mix of academics and practitioners.

One criticism is that the book is too much like a dry collection of symposium papers. There are too many diagrams and graphs and repetitive lists of aims. A certain lack of humanity in some of the papers makes almost chilling reading. The book would have been both strengthened and softened by having a section written from the perspective of the consumer.

However, a reader who digs down into the book will find some sections that shine with interest and commitment. One chapter describes palliative care in India and in compassionate words sketches some of the difficulties faced by patients who travel hundreds of miles from remote villages to city hospitals where they cannot be guaranteed a bed and may have to sleep on the floor. Palliative care in India is not only complicated by poverty and over-crowding, but also by laws on the use of oral morphine, which vary from state to state and can mean that a physician may wait four years before he gets permission to use oral morphine to relive pain in advanced cancer.

The chapter on east European countries gives an interesting account of palliative care development since democratic reforms in the 1980s and 1990s. Helpful contact is now being made with western hospices for exchanging information, education and materials.

The concluding section puts a strong case for palliative care to be extended to all chronically sick and dying people, not just cancer sufferers. This book could be usefully read by politicians contemplating cutting services, as well as by professionals.

Maureen Oswin is a writer and researcher and author of Am I Allowed to Cry?