Palliative care in the acute hospital setting

Dr Sara Booth trained in palliative care at St Christopher's Hospice in London and Sobell House in Oxford. After holding an NHS R&D Training Fellowship at the Oxford Radcliffe Trust, she moved to Cambridge in 1998 to set up a hospital palliative care service and has continued research in Breathlessness and evaluating a Breathlessness Intervention Service which she founded there. She is Honorary Senior Lecturer in the Department of Palliative Care and Policy at Kings College London, and Associate Lecturer in the University of Cambridge.

Polly Edmonds is a consultant and lead clinician in Palliative Medicine at King's College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and honorary clinical senior lecturer in the Department of Palliative Care, Policy & Rehabilitation, King's College London. She qualified from St Mary's Hospital Medical School, and trained in General Medicine, Medical Oncology and Palliative Medicine prior to taking up her consultant post in 1997. She has led the development of the clinical Palliative Care Team at King's and is closely involved in the undergraduate curriculum at the King's College London School of Medicine, as Palliative Medicine teaching lead, deputy head of year 4 and year 4 OSCE coordinator. Jointly with Dr Rachel Burman, Polly is training programme director for the London and KSS Deanery Specialty Training Programme for Palliative Medicine. She has previously chaired the Southeast London Palliative Care coordinating Group of the South East London Cancer Network and remains an active participant.

Margaret A Kendall is a Macmillan Consultant Nurse in Palliative Care employed by Warrington and Halton Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. She took up this post in 2001 although her clinical career in palliative care began in 1989 with her appointment as a Macmillan Clinical Nurse Specialist in the Merseyside area. She is an Independent Nurse Prescriber since 2003 and hold outpatient clinics twice weekly. She has been involved in consultations on the nursing perspective of Palliative Care for the Renal NSF and has contributed to the workings of National Prescribing Centre on the safe disposal of Controlled Drugs in the Community in the wake of the Shipman Inquiry. Particular areas of research interest are examining the impacts of palliative care interventions for patients with Non Malignant Disease, and why student nurses encounter difficulties in caring for dying patients.