King's College London

King’s Health Partners has published the first outcomes book from our Palliative Care Clinical Academic Group (CAG).

The Palliative Care CAG leads research, treatment and care for patients with progressive illness and ensures high quality palliative and end-of-life care is available to everyone who needs it, in hospice, hospital or at home.

Palliative care is the active total care of patients with life-limiting or life-threatening illnesses. The goal of palliative care is the achievement of the best possible quality of life for patients and those important to them. The CAG includes the Cicely Saunders Institute which is the world’s first purpose-built institute of palliative care integrating research, education and clinical practice in clinical care.

Highlights from the book include:

• Developing research, with almost a quarter of the top 10% of most cited palliative care papers globally including research from King’s Health Partners. The CAG is rated top in Europe for research output in palliative care and second in the world, after Harvard (p.89)
• Progressing on diversity and inclusion, including leading on research to determine whether there is an attrition of women along the academic pipeline in palliative care. The findings directly prompted the European Association of Palliative Care (EAPC) to routinely collect and analyse gender information to help drive equality (p.23)
• Measuring clinical outcomes, including developing and improving the Palliative Care Outcome Scale (POS) family of measures, to capture changes in symptoms and quality of life experienced by patients (p.28). Read our Value Based Healthcare case study on POS
• Growing clinical services with approximately 5,000 patients being seen per year across the CAG. Data also showed that palliative care symptoms and concerns have improved across the CAG (p.38/43)
• Supporting patients, families and staff through a range of activities, facilities and support, including dedicated resources for children, talk back and debriefing sessions, Dying Matters events and more (p.59)
• Pioneering and evaluating new models of care and interventions, including a breathlessness support service which has increased quality of life for patients with advanced diseases by integrating palliative and respiratory care (p.64)
• Successes in education and training, including the CAG’s Master of Science (MSc) in Palliative Care which is the longest running multi-professional research-based programme in the world (p.73)
• Adding patient experience to clinical and research perspectives through a range of activities including patient and public involvement (PPI) workshops, which allow clinicians and researchers to present research to PPI panels and gain feedback (p.84)

This article was originally published on the King's Health Partners website and has been reproduced with their permission.