Dr Libby Sallnow is a palliative medicine consultant with CNWL NHS Trust in London, UK, an honorary senior clinical lecturer at St Christopher’s Hospice and the UCL Marie Curie Palliative Care Research Department, UK and a post-doc researcher and guest professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), Belgium.

She has helped lead and develop the fields of new public health approaches to end-of-life care, compassionate communities and social approaches to death, dying and loss over the past two decades in the UK and internationally. Her PhD explored the translation of a model of compassionate communities from Kerala, India to London, UK. She has published a number of articles and book chapters in these fields and co-edited the book “International perspectives on public health and palliative care” in 2011.

She is an Honorary Consultant at the WHO Collaborating Centre for Palliative Care in Kerala, India, Vice President of Public Health Palliative Care International, the President of the Palliative Care Section of the Royal Society of Medicine, UK, and the first author of the new Lancet Commission on the Value of death: bringing death back into life (2022).