All you need to know about research in palliative care

1. BAYERO UNIVERSITY KANO
BY
SAMBO,NICKY MARIAH
MSC NURSING, MED-SURGE
SPS/19/MNS/00012
COURSE: NUR 8234
Research In Palliative Care
Dr. Jibril

2. Outline
• Introduction
• Definitions
• Principles of palliative care
• Types of research in palliative care
• Ethical dilemmas in research in palliative care
• Model of ethical decision making
• Challenges of research in palliative care
• Some topics to be research on
• Summary
• Conclusion
• References

3. Introduction
• Research is important in any area of science, health,
and medicine to help professionals find new
observations, insights, understandings, and
treatments. Palliative care is a relatively new field,
especially in Africa and Nigeria, and requires much
active researches to give us knowledge based on
local settings and environment.

4. Definitions
• The WHO defines palliative care as ‘an approach that
improves the quality of life of patients and their
families facing the problem associated with life-
threatening illness, through the prevention and
relief of suffering by means of early identification
and impeccable assessment and treatment of pain
and other problems, physical, psychosocial and
spiritual’.

5. Definitions cont…
• Research in the Palliative Care Program seeks
to:
Identify and fix common and uncommon
symptoms by developing new methods of
patient-reported outcomes.
Develop new ways to fix common and uncommon
symptoms such as dyspepsia, malignant
hyperthermia and chronic pain.

6. PRINCIPLES OF PALLIATIVE CARE
• Care is patient, family and carer centered
• Care is equitable
• Care provided is based on assessed need
• Patients, families and carers have access to local
and networked services to meet their needs

7. PRINCIPLES OF PALLIATIVE CARE
CONT..
• Care is evidence-based, clinically and
culturally safe and effective
• Care is integrated and coordinated

12. The challenges of evidence-based
palliative care research
• Many palliative care trials are observational
in nature and observational studies lack the
robustness of randomized controlled trials.
• Indirect link between the evidence and
practice. An example of this issue is the use
of anticholinergic treatments for the
management of excessive secretions at the
end of life.

13. Challenges cont…
• Most of the reviews published in the
palliative care area do not provide robust
evidence to guide clinical practice because
of the small number of studies in the field
or the heterogeneous nature of the studies
and in some cases their low quality.

14. PALLIATIVE CARE RESEARCH NETWORK (PCRN) 5 YEAR PLAN IN IRELAND

15. TOPICS FOR RESEARCH
• Pain and pain relief
• Fatigue, lymphoedema, delirium, nausea, cachexia, etc
• Psychological issues like depression, demoralization,
phobias, anxiety, panic
• Social factors like social stresses, social support, family
issues
• Communication issues like collusion, difficult questions
• Interventions-pharmacological or non-pharmacological,
complementary methods
• Staff stress and burnout
• Systematic reviews and meta analysis
• Grief and bereavement , etc.

16. Summary and Conclusion
• Palliative care research is vital because of the
patient population, the individualized aims of
the treatment and the tract of the irremediable
nature of the patients’ disease require a shift in
thinking towards how to design and implement
robust and rigorous research into palliative care
that is person centered and also adds to the
evidence base for palliative care practice.

18. References
• Khalil, Hanan; Ristevski, Eli (2018 )The challenges
of evidence-based palliative care research,
International Journal of Evidence-Based
Healthcare: Volume 16 - Issue 3 - p 136-137 doi:
10.1097/XEB.0000000000000153
• Higginson I J (2016) Research challenges in
palliative and end of life care. BMJ Supportive &
Palliative Care 2016;6:2–4.
doi:10.1136/bmjspcare-2015-001091

19. References
• Higginson IJ Research challenges in palliative and
end of life care.BMJ Supportive & Palliative
Care 2016;6:2-4.
• Santosh K Chaturvedi ( 2011) How to Plan Research
in Palliative Care. National Institute of Mental Health
& Neurosciences, Bangalore, India

20. Reference
• Australian Commission on Safety and Quality
in Health care. National Safety and Quality
Health Service (NSQHS) Standards:
Comprehensive Care Standard. Sydney:
ACSQHC; 2019.