Dr Julian Abel became a consultant in palliative care in 2001. He was the chair of the organising committee for the 4th International Public Health and Palliative Care Conference in 2015 and was Vice President of Public Health Palliative Care International. Since 2016 he has worked with Frome Medical Practice in Somerset in developing a new model of primary care combined with compassionate communities. He is co-author of The Compassion Project which describes the background to the Frome Project and the implications of compassion in medicine and in society at large. Along with Dr Kellehear and Dr Catherine Millington Sanders he formed Compassionate Communities UK, of which he is Director. The charity has been formed to develop broader roll-out of compassionate communities in both primary care and end of life care. Dr Abel also runs a podcast, Survival of the Kindest, about compassion and its absence.
Dr Allan Kellehear is Clinical Professor in the College of Nursing and Health Sciences at the University of Vermont, USA. He was formerly 50th Anniversary Professor (End of Life Care) at the University of Bradford in the UK. He has previously held chairs in social sciences, public health, or palliative care at Middlesex, Bath, Tokyo, and La Trobe Universities. He has held honorary professorships in Austria, Australia, Canada, China, Ireland, Japan, United Kingdom, and the USA. He is internationally acknowledged to be the leading academic proponent of health-promoting palliative care and the compassionate communities/cities movement.