Our Purpose

The mission of the End-of-life Care Research Program is to improve the quality of palliative and end-of-life care for patients and their families. The End-of-Life Care Research Program is composed of clinical and health services investigators and staff working on research projects that have as their overall goal the improvement of palliative and end-of-life care. In addition to providing core support for these specific projects, the Program serves as a resource to other investigators conducting related research.

Current Research

Our current specific research goals are to:

1)  Measure and improve the quality of patient-clinician communication about end-of-life care.
2)  Identify and overcome barriers to patient-clinician communication about end-of-life care.
3)  Develop interventions that will improve the quality of patient-clinician communication about end-of-life care and the quality of care at the end of life.
4)  Develop a series of process and outcome measures that can be used as end-points in evaluations of end-of-life care.