The development of palliative care for people with progressive neurological disease

The role of palliative care for people with neurological disease has been developing for over 50 years, and was described from the early days of the modern hospice movement. This thesis considers my papers and studies which have helped in establishing the need for palliative care, the involvement of specialist palliative care services, the effectiveness of palliative care for neurological patients, the importance of complex decision making for this patient group and the development of guidelines, to enable care to be more widely established for patients and families. These papers have developed from the evidence from earlier research and the experience of hospices and specialist palliative care teams and helped to encourage further research. They have been important in providing an evidence-base for neurological palliative care and support-ed a wider recognition of the role of palliative care for people with neurological disease. The re-search reported here demonstrates how the increasing collaboration between specialist palliative care services and neurology can result in improved care of patients with neurological dis-ease, together with their families.