David Blum - European Intersectorial and Multi-disciplinary Palliative Care Research Training

EURO IMPACT aims to develop a multi-disciplinary, multi-professional and intersectorial educational and research training network aimed at monitoring and improving palliative care in Europe. Palliative care is less than optimal in many developed countries and some patients suffer from severe symptoms. While international research on palliative care has begun to develop over the past decades, it has not kept pace with the growing demand for high quality care. The increase in elderly people, chronic disease s and health care costs, makes the provision of enhanced research training in palliative care one of the most urgent societal challenges at EU level. The training and research programme of EURO IMPACT are closely intertwined, involving 5 universities, 2 p rivate companies and 3 socio-economic actors, and training 12 early stage and 4 experienced researchers. The partners are at the forefront of palliative research training and represent a wide spectrum of disciplines and professions. The research training involves researchers working together, with different methodologies and datasets gathered in different countries and from multiple perspectives. It will provide a broad overview on palliative care and its quality in Europe and identify tools to improve it . On-the-job training will be supplemented with structured courses concerning palliative care research and network-wide training on multi-disciplinary, ethics, cross-national research and societal dissemination. In order to influence policy and clinical p ractice in palliative care, all partners and researchers are involved in societal dissemination of the training results to a wider national and international audience. EURO IMPACT reduces current fragmentation of research training in palliative care and p rovides the new generation of European researchers with the necessary scientific and complementary skills to influence future palliative care at national and international level, and at practice and policy level.