10 The contribution to palliative care of allied health professions

Palliative care has been very successful at taking ideas, values and techniques from other disciplines in healthcare. Such borrowing of ideas has nearly always included considerable adaptation from the parent discipline. However, the notion of cross-boundary, inter-disciplinary working is now highly developed in palliative care. Some disciplines such as medicine and nursing have become core parts of the specialist team, whereas others have been accessed on an as-required basis. Increasingly, individual allied health professions have seen the need to evolve the palliative care specialism within the generic discipline. Allied health professionals (AHPs) include occupational therapists, physiotherapists, nutritional experts, speech and language therapists, clinical psychologists, social workers and chaplains, pharmacists, art and music therapists.