The Cicely Saunders Institute’s mission is to pioneer the very best in palliative care and rehabilitation by integrating:

• Cutting-edge research - committed to building new knowledge and discovering new treatments through world-leading ethical and robust clinical, applied and health services research

• Skilled multi-professional care - delivering top-quality evidence-based clinical care and support to patients and carers, for life and living, and death and dying

• Innovation in engagement and education - to embed change in policy and practice nationally and internationally, engage with patients and public, and inspire tomorrow's leaders in the field from around the world.

 

We seek to enable high quality ethical research to be conducted and quickly fed into care, practice and policy - improving palliative care and enabling people to live better, with dignity and the least possible suffering.

This strategy fits into the King’s Health Partners' goal of being an AHSC that promotes patient and family-centred care, as our entire programme of work is underpinned by delivery of evidence-based care in line with the WHO definitions of palliative care and rehabilitation.

Our research is focussed in four main strands:

• Evaluating and improving care – with studies to develop and test existing and new interventions and treatments, such as short term palliative care, or care for conditions beyond cancer, in neurological, renal, heart or liver failure. This research will determine the most effective and cost-effective services, identify when people miss out on the best in care, feeding into government policy and funding.

• Focussed clinical research on symptoms. We are investigating more effective ways to prevent and treat difficult-to-control and poorly understood symptoms such as breathlessness, fatigue, depression and pain, and undertake clinical trials to evaluate new treatments, including trials to test complex support services in breathlessness, management of pain using opioids, treatments in spasticity.

• Outcome and assessment measures, with a focus on developing and refining short patient and family reported measures that can be used in clinical practice as well as research to provide more humane, dignified and cost-effective measures. This research will help the understanding of the complexity of palliative care and rehabilitation, how to assess need, and help to set standards of care for all patients with cancer and other progressive illnesses, and for their families and carers.

• Living and dying in society, to future proof the delivery of palliative care and rehabilitation, by focussing on the populations of tomorrow, the very elderly, informal caregivers, evolving preferences, cultural needs. We focus on currently neglected groups, including older people, black and minority ethnic communities, people in socially excluded groups and in economically deprived contexts. We work with ethicists and social scientists to examine spiritual and ethical issues.

 

Across all these strands we conduct methodological development, to refine the methods of research in palliative care and rehabilitation to improve rigour, ethical standards and ways to capture the most profoundly ill populations.  Palliative care and rehabilitation are by definition complex interventions, and our concept-to-care programme of interventions supports the KCL “Pathway to Impact on Health” through our MRC-funded programme to refine and implement the MRC framework to develop and test complex interventions. The complexity of person-centred care is reflected in our large multidisciplinary clinical academic team.

Many of our measures and tools are freely available and downloadable, see for example www.pos-pal.org.

The department has an international reputation for teaching and research, and benefits from being set within a multi-faculty institution. The department’s members embrace a range of methodologies, both quantitative and qualitative, and collaborate widely, within and beyond the UK, see our teaching and courses pages.