Marie Curie  calls for end of life care research proposals

Marie Curie  is calling for research applications to its £1 million palliative care research fund to improve end of life care for those with cancer and/or other illnesses.

Steve Dewar, Director of Research and Innovation for Marie Curie, said: “There is a real gap in funding for research work in palliative care and, as the leading end of life care charity, we believe that such research is vital to the task of improving care to help all of us at the end of our lives.

“This research will help us understand the best end of life care and enable us and others to deliver that care in practice.”

Applications are considered in the following areas:

• Exploring variation in care at the end of life - research with the potential to enable a better understanding of the way in which the experience of care at the end of life varies across the UK.
• Measuring outcomes of care at the end of life - research on the development and evaluation of patient and carer centred outcome assessments using qualitative, quantitative and mixed method approaches.
• Controlling symptoms in the last year of life - proposals for well designed, ethical, prospective, empirical studies, using comparative methods such as randomised controlled trials or other high quality observational and/or quasi experimental designs.

Marie Curie launched the £3 million programme in 2010, committing up to £1 million of academic research funding per year for three years. The process for application and review is being administered by Cancer Research UK.

Applications can be made online at: www.cancerresearchuk.org/marie-curie-research-programme and must be submitted in full by April 8, 2011. Proposals will be accepted from scientists, clinicians or health care workers in UK universities, medical schools, hospitals and some research institutions.

For further details on submitting applications, please contact Dr Sabine Best on 020 7091 4144 or sabine.best@mariecurie.org.uk

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