End of life care is a core theme in pre-registration nursing and an area of widespread training for qualified staff, who specialise in palliative care. While there a lots of books aimed at the latter market, very few texts focus on the needs of nursing students and newly qualified staff. This new text is therefore designed to be a text for pre-registration students to help them prepare for the challenges they face in nursing dying patients and supporting their families. Traditionally palliative care has been closely associated with cancer and focused on treatment at the end of life. With advances in treament and people now being able to manage long term conditions there has been a shift in emphasis where palliative care is something that features much earlier in a patient's journey and is delivered to increasing numbers of people. As such it is more useful to think in holistic terms where long term conditions, palliative care and the final stages of life are considered in an integrated fashion. This is a key feature of the proposal that sets it apart from existing books on the market. The proposal caters for a number of clearly defined student needs: 1 The NMC standards for nursing students specify that palliative and end of life care must be taught at pre-registration level and have specific requirements for care in their Essential Skills Clusters. 2 Students are often extremely anxious about care of the dying and the book guides them through challenging areas of practice with a chapter on 'support for the supporter', case studies and guided reflection 3 Holistic care that includes family, carers and inter-professional work is crucial for students to becomed skilled practitioners. The book provides practical strategies for achieving this through dedicated chapters and consideration of existing models and frameworks that can be quickly applied. There has been a dearth of literature on this subject for the student nurse with publishers traditionally focussing on higher level post registration training or the practitioner market, with the palliative care medical book market beingmore devloped. A palliative care textbook that is expressly designed for the student nurse will be meeting a need that is currently served by very few books. We have recently published a textbook on End of Life Nursing which will be a natural sister text for this proposal and has made a promising start since publishing in November 2012. Reviewers are positive about the book's potential. The author has agreed to incorporate the following suggestions: 1. Long term conditions will be considered throughout the book in an integrated fashion rather than within a single chapter 2. Chapter 1 will more thoroughly explore the terminology and context of the subject helping students understand the differences and overlaps between the terms palliative care, long term conditions, end of life care, terminal care etc. 3. The communication chapter will be broadened out to cover more than just the need to break bad news. 4. Rather than attempt to cover symptom management in a single chapter, clincial application will be explored through activities and case studies across the book 5. The Liverpool pathway will be covered in chapter 1 and chapter 10. 6. The structure has been improved following feedback with ethics coming before legal aspects of palliative care. 7. The term excellence has been dropped from the title with the book being more clearly targeted as a student introduction.