This book's striking message is that palliative care does not deliver on its aims to value people who are dying and make death and dying a natural part of life. 

This book draws from wider social science perspectives and critically and specifically applies these perspectives to palliative care and its dominant medical model. Applying Social Role Valorisation, the author argues for the de-institutionalisation of palliative care and the development of an alternative framework to the approaches found in hospices, palliative care units and community-based palliative care services. He offers a new conceptualisation of death and loss that refines and expands modern understandings in a way that also resonates with traditional religious views concerning death.

Wide-ranging recommendations advise fundamental change in the concept of palliative care, the way support and services are organised and the day to day practice of palliative care.

Rethinking palliative care will be of interest to academics, students and practitioners in palliative care as well as those in disability, social policy, sociology, social work, religion, thanatology, nursing and other health related fields.