Death anxiety, or 'thanatophobia', is a state in which people experience negative emotional reactions in recognition of their own mortality. Emergency and unscheduled healthcare workers, such as emergency nurses and paramedics, are constantly reminded of death and therefore of their own mortality, and this makes them susceptible to death anxiety. This article introduces the concept of death anxiety, and highlights the need for staff, employers and universities to recognise its signs and symptoms. It also suggests some interventions that could prevent the debilitating effects of death anxiety, to improve staff's mental health and the care they provide to patients.

Holistic care is often a term widely associated with mental health professions, self help and alternative therapies, and often wrongly deemed irrelevant by those working in the pre-hospital care arena. The paradigm of an individual being much more than just the skin and bone holding itself together has gained increasing emphasis over recent decades in medicine, nursing, and now paramedicine. This article reviews the current literature and focuses on the concept of paramedics exploring not just the traditional physical needs of their patients but also the psychological and sociological. It further explores the drive to change attitudes held by pre-hospital practitioners that holistic care as irrelevant and meaningless. By distancing ourselves as a profession from the outdated perception of paramedicine as merely an emergency transportation service, we can change attitudes and thus expand the constraints of biomedical models of emergency and unscheduled health and appreciate the importance of biopsychosocial care for both patients and practitioners.

Paramedics play an integral part in community end-of-life care (EoLC) in the UK, especially given the lack of out-of-hours cover by palliative care specialists. Despite this, there remain multiple barriers to their fully effective provision of such care. This article provides a brief historical overview of paramedic practice, before highlighting some of the barriers to effective paramedic EoLC provision and introducing examples of collaborative work in the UK that aim to overcome these. The author hopes this will support improvements in paramedic-led EoLC. Given the similarities in the international evolution of paramedic education, readers from other countries will be able to relate to these findings.