"Diversity and Quality". With that in mind, we worked for the 24^th^ International Conference of Indian Association of Palliative Care organized at Coimbatore, India from 10^th^ to 12^th^ February 2017. The conference was jointly organised by the G. Kuppuswamy Naidu Memorial Hospital and Coimbatore Cancer Foundation.

The theme of our conference was Adding Value to

AwarenessLearningDeciding RightCare until the End.

As with the previous conferences, we focused to improve the credibility of information and to help advance the effectiveness, and equitability of scientific information disseminated.

Our emphasis on giving members of the audience a range of topics from recent evidence, interactive hands on sessions, topics related to advocacy, team work, organization, and philosophy was well received.

We are glad we were given a good feedback from the multidisciplinary audience, which numbered close to 1000, which was probably one of the highest numbers participating in the history of this conference. The delegates represented 16 countries and from19 states and 4 Union Territories of India.

We received a significant number of abstracts from a whole lot of students, doctors, nurses, social workers, psychologists, and members of several palliative care organisations. We had a committee to review and select those for oral and poster presentations. The top three abstracts selected by the reviewers were presented as part of the plenary sessions.

We also held five excellent Pre conference workshops, three of those were organized by the conference committee; focused on advocacy and training to help awareness locally and in Tamil Nadu.

The present issue of IJPC is the collection of abstracts presented as papers, posters, and talks. On behalf of the scientific committee, I would like to express my deep gratitude to everyone who has showed immense interest and passion to submit such a variety of abstracts, share their presentations, and articles for publication.

We would like to thank the Scientific Committee, and the Advisory Board for their expertise and support.

I would like to thank Dr. Odette Spruyt, Dr. Charu Singh, Dr. Anand Narayan, Dr. Latha Balasubramani, Dr. Vidya Kumarasamy, Dr. Rajith and of course Dr. Balaji, the Organising Secretary, who showed us an exemplary example of team work and excellent planning.
