ABSTRACT
Palliative care aims to preserve a person’s dignity and quality of life in the face of incurable illness. In this chapter I shall present an overview of what such care entails and shall look at some of the current issues for palliative care in Britain. First of all, however, it is important to make a distinction between a life-threatening illness and a terminal one, since the two terms are used with some degree of overlap throughout this book. For a person with a diagnosis of cancer, treatment through chemotherapy, radiotherapy and surgery may offer the possibility that the cancer will be removed. In such cases the person is described as going into ‘remission’ and there is a hope that the cancer will not recur. For someone in this position the term palliative care may not be strictly appropriate since it refers to care provided when illness cannot be cured. The work of art therapists described in this book is intended to illustrate a way of working with individuals who have had to face their own mortality and associated losses whether or not death will be the outcome. This issue is explored in the final chapter by Barbara Morley, who used art therapy following her own diagnosis of cancer.
