Handbook of palliative care.

Christina Faull, Yvonne Carter, Richard Woof (eds). (410 pages, £26.50.) Blackwell Science Ltd, 1998. ISBN 0-632-04779-8. During the 1990s, books on palliative care have multiplied like mice. One is forced to ask, ‘Why this one?’ So I began to read this book with a degree of scepticism. The back-cover tells me that Handbook of Palliative Care is written particularly with the GP and Primary Health Care Team in mind but “will prove useful to a wide range of professionals and students including doctors, nurses and pharmacists”. The editors are, respectively, a consultant in palliative care, a professor of general practice and primary care, and a clinical lecturer in general practice, and the individual authors form an impressive group. The first editor contributed solely or in part to about a third of the 22 chapters. Clearly, against such a background, there has to be a lot of good and helpful material in the book. It has an attractive layout and the format for the figures is appealing. However, I was surprised that the first subject I looked up in the index—ascites—was not there. I began to wonder what else had slipped through the net. The weight of the book was also definitely off-putting: 396 pages—are they all necessary? I began to wonder what could be cut down or cut right out with the aim of making it easier to handle. Well, Chapter 1 could be much reduced and so could Chapter 2. Surely GPs and the Primary Health Care Team know all about district nurses and practice nurses already? Chapter 3 similarly is excellent but probably mostly redundant. Is this really the place to instruct GPs about prescribing controlled drugs? On the other hand, although mentioned briefly in the final chapter, the issue of prescribing ‘beyond the licence’ is barely dealt with. Given the increase in Patient Information Leaflets this is something that could usefully have been discussed.