Declaration of interests LS is an honorary consultant at the WHO Collaborating Centre for Community Participation in Palliative Care and Long Term Care. RS is the chair of Patients Know Best, a for-profit company that gives patients and citizens access to and control of their health and social care records. The system can be used to include advanced care plans and advance directives. He is unpaid but has equity in the company. He is also the unpaid chair of the Point of Care Foundation, which works to humanise health and social care, including at the end of life, and of the UK Health Alliance on Climate Change, which brings together many royal colleges, the British Medical Association, The Lancet, and BMJ to mitigate the effects of climate change and emphasise the risks and potential benefits to health. He holds shares in the UnitedHealth Group, a health and wellbeing company operating in the USA, UK, and other countries, that offers end-of-life services. SHA received an honorarium in 2018 by Mundipharma for leading a publication on cancer pain in low-income and middle-income countries. MH is employed as Head of Information Support at Hospice UK. Hospice UK is the national charity for hospice and end-of-life care. It works to ensure all adults and children living with a terminal or life-shortening illness receive the care and support they need, when they need it. CK, like most people, has personal experience of deaths and prolongation of life that influence the way she thinks as a scholar about these issues. She has written about these publicly, in particular the unwanted prolongation of her sister Polly's life contrary to her best interests, and her mother's death, which was greatly supported by an advance decision to refuse treatment and a lasting power of attorney for health and welfare. CK is also on a number of committees, working parties, and charities related to death and dying, including the core group of the British Medical Association group revising the guidance on clinically assisted nutrition and hydration, and the Guideline Development Group on Prolonged Disorders of Consciousness of the Royal College of Physicians. FMK reports consulting fees unrelated to this paper from Merck KGaA/EMD Serono for work on gender equity in leadership, non-financial support from Grunenthal Foundation, and grants from Roche, Vitas Healthcare, Chinoin, Grunenthal, and Novartis, outside the submitted work. JN is the Chair of University College Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and Whittington Health NHS Trust. MRR is the unpaid chair of Pallium India, a charitable trust in India that works towards integration of palliative care with health care, and the unpaid director of Trivandrum Institute of Palliative Sciences, a WHO Collaborating Centre for Training and Policy on Access to Pain Relief. ES reports personal fees from the Social Science Research Council during the conduct of the study; and personal fees from Saitama Prefectural University (Japan), Kyoto University (Japan), and the University of Tokyo (Japan), outside the submitted work. KES is funded by a National Institute for Health Research Clinician Scientist Fellowship (CS-2015-15-005) and is the Laing Galazka Chair in Palliative Care at King's College London, funded by an endowment from Cicely Saunders International and the Kirby Laing Foundation. The views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the NHS, the National Institute for Health Research, or the Department of Health and Social Care. All other authors declare no competing interests.