The assisted dying campaigner Debbie Purdy died in a hospice in Bradford before Christmas. Her life and death, which comes amid escalating pressure on the Government to legalise assisted dying, has raised wider questions about poor access to palliative care and to hospices Over the next 20 years, the hospice movement will face unprecedented challenges. These include ever-increasing demands as people live longer, an ageing workforce, a crisis of funding and pressure from right-to-die campaigners. This last-named group argues that it would be more dignified to let terminally ill people take their own lives rather than, as they see it, suffer a long and agonising decline.Palliative care – the active care of patients with advanced progressive illness – includes the management of