The increase of cancer and other progressive illness as a cause of death in our society poses new problems for health professionals, for health care spending, and for society as a whole. In future years there will be a keener debate over such questions of ways to meet the growing cultural diversity in our society, of euthanasia, advance directives, and location of dying, together with the economic, social, psychological, spiritual and ethical implications of these trends.

The Department has been developing this strand of research over the last five years. Key areas of work currently include:

• Death at home: preferences, factors and trends
• Ethnicity: The experience of living with and dying from advanced cancer in the black Caribbean and white UK populations living in south east London
• Palliative care in the world (worldwide research)
• Older people