ABSTRACT
The modern hospice movement has established a new model of care for the dying. Initially this model was developed outside the hospital setting, which was perceived to be failing to meet the needs of dying patients. There has been an enormous and rapid expansion in the number of hospice beds available in the UK (and to a lesser extent worldwide) over the past 30 years, yet hospices do not have the physical capacity to care for all the dying. When questioned, most patients would prefer to die at home, but the majority continue to die in acute hospitals. It has therefore been a logical step to try to import the increasingly well-developed practices of palliative care as modelled in the hospice setting into the care of patients in hospital. The first teams designed with this purpose in mind appeared in the mid1970s in New York, Montreal and London. There are now 208 hospital-based palliative care (PC) teams in the UK alone.
