**Preface**

Today, palliative care is seen as an essential part of public health care. The provision of palliative care in the community is a public duty. Palliative care and end-of-life care at home for all in need can only be done as a cooperation of healthcare professionals and citizens. The Compassionate Communities approach introduced by Kellehear and others has led to the recognition of palliative care as everyone's business and an important public health topic. Unfortunately, death literacy is not yet common among the public. Public awareness of palliative care is low, and public palliative care education is rarely implemented in most communities. Nevertheless, some educational programs for public palliative care education, for example, the Last Aid Course, do exist in some countries in Europe, Brazil and Australia.

There are many open questions concerning public health palliative care and public education. Activation of citizens is needed to enable them to participate in palliative care and end-of-life care provision. Cultural aspects of public health palliative care must be explored and included in future public palliative care education programs.

The goal of this reprint on "Public Health Palliative Care and Public Palliative Care Education" is to highlight recent advances and challenges in public health palliative care and education. It includes original research, reviews and other papers that address these challenges and has collected chapters that cover a broad range of topics, including social and cultural aspects and experiences with public health palliative care and public palliative care education in the communities.

The reprint will be of interest to researchers and clinicians from various fields and to policymakers, officials, and politicians who make public health decisions and policies for the future, facing demographic changes and an increased need for palliative care and end-of-life care in the community.

The COVID-19 pandemic has shown the importance of a broad implementation of palliative care in all communities and societies. Public palliative care education and participation of volunteers and the public in cooperation with community health care and specialized palliative care services can help to ensure palliative care for all in need in the future.

We want to thank all authors who have contributed to the work published in this reprint. Their contributions are described in more detail in the first chapter. We are grateful for the support from our families, colleagues and the whole team from healthcare that helped to make this possible.

> **Georg Bollig and John Rosenberg** *Editors*
