Marie Curie Palliative Care Institute awarded £750K research grant

The Marie Curie Palliative Care Institute, Liverpool (MCPCIL) has been awarded a £750,000 prestigious Programme Grant for research to enable the Institute to deliver a range of research and other projects to help improve care for the terminally ill.

MCPCIL was formed in 2004 and is a partnership between the University of Liverpool, Marie Curie Cancer Care, and the Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen University Hospitals NHS Trust. The Institute aims to make a real and sustained difference to care at the end of life from bedside to policy, through service innovation and improvement, research and development, and knowledge transfer to inform clinical excellence.

The grant will help to fund work in priority areas such as pain control; hydration in palliative care patients; the biology of dying; diagnosing dying; chemical compatibility of drugs used at the end of life; provision of simulation training for clinical staff to support effective care in the last hours or days of life; anticipatory care planning interventions; medical education research; training programmes; and benchmarking for continuous quality improvement programmes across its growing network of international collaborators.

Professor of Palliative Medicine and Director of MCPCIL, John Ellershaw, said: “I am very pleased to accept this Programme Grant on behalf of the Institute and we look forward to working on a programme of research that will help build the evidence base that will facilitate and improve care for the dying on a national and international basis.”

Professor Kevin Park, Head of the Institute of Translational Medicine, said “This is a significant programme grant award for MCPCIL, for the Institute of Translational Medicine, for the University, and partners. It recognises the significant work we do here in Liverpool to pursue excellence in care for the dying. We look forward to the outputs of this work as it progresses.”

For more information about MCPCIL, visit: http://bit.ly/1SzqgLd