In this themed issue on supportive and palliative care beyond cancer, we have brought together a number of articles that explore the boundaries of practice and look to the future of clinical services. As the research reports came in, it became apparent that this is the broadest of themes for a journal like ours and the variety of approaches to the subject is itself instructive to clinicians developing new responses to the problems of chronic disease and frailty.

My choice of the contents of a very rich issue is the excellent review by Karen Cox and others on public attitudes to death and dying in the UK. The authors identified three principle themes in the literature: preferences relating to death and dying, attitudes to euthanasia and attitudes to life-sustaining treatments and interventions. In spite of the published work tending to report …