Developing palliative care practice in the community.

The inadequacy of some areas of palliative care provision was acknowledged in the NHS Cancer Plan (DoH 2000). Many patients would prefer to die at home, but only one quarter are able to do so because of the lack of community or specialist palliative care teams in some parts of the country. The Lancashire and South Cumbria Cancer Services Network developed an initiative to meet the educational and training needs of practitioners delivering palliative care in the community.