King's College London

Around 90,000 people die in poverty each year in the UK. Better access to benefits for people living with a terminal illness can help to lift people out of poverty and improve dignity. We don’t know how many people living with a terminal illness miss out on benefits, but in the wider community, benefits often go unclaimed.

To improve benefit take-up for people living with terminal illness, we need: information on how many terminally ill people take up the benefits available to them; and an understanding of the experience of making a claim, and interventions that could improve take-up, especially for groups most at risk of under-claiming.

This research involves:

Analysis of existing data to investigate the take-up of benefits among people living with a terminal illness.

Interviews with patients and family members, and focus groups with healthcare professionals to understand the barriers and facilitators to claiming benefits.

A review of existing benefit take-up initiatives to understand what is already being done to support people living with a terminal illness.

The development of guidance for healthcare professionals to support patients to make benefit claims, and to make policy recommendations for increasing benefit take-up for people living with terminal illness.

Aims

• To understand the barriers and facilitators to claiming benefits for terminally ill people from the perspective of patients, family members, and health care professionals.
• To develop guidance and resources for healthcare professionals to support patients and families to make benefit claims.

Bite-size training for clinicians

Watch our bite-sized training video for clinicians on helping patients to access benefits via the ‘Special Rules for End of Life.' We have made this short video to help clinicians understand their role in completing SR1 forms. This training was presented by Steve Marshall, a social worker in the palliative care team at King's College Hospital and a researcher at King's College London.