Research England: Building critical mass for palliative care research through collaborative support, exchange, and challenge

IMPACCT is a partner in the Research England i3 grant awarded to the Wolfson Palliative Care Research Centre at the University of Hull. This grant allows these two significant palliative care groups to build on their strategic partnership and expand the scale and impact of collaborative research activities

Although both the Wolfson Palliative Care Research Centre (Wolfson) at the University of Hull and IMPACCT are relatively new our closely aligned research priorities and our commitment to producing excellent and practice-changing outputs have generated 69 joint research publications and grant income of £10.5 million.

Palliative care research is still in its infancy, despite the serious population changes that are already increasing the need for high-quality palliative care. Sizeable research groups are rare, yet a critical mass is required to provide the momentum needed to deliver the innovations in health and social care that are urgently needed for an ageing worldwide population. Strengthening, deepening, and broadening our established collaboration is the obvious next step to ensure that such critical mass is generated, further expanded, and delivers impactful research.

Joint supervision across institutions and countries broadens input and helps develop rounded early career researchers. Such an exchange program and exposure to each other’s institutional networks will provide a stimulating environment, cross fertilise ideas and support the growth of early career researchers. There are few research-active professors of palliative care worldwide.

Closer working between Wolfson and IMPACCT will stimulate peer challenge between senior colleagues, stimulate the quality and raise the success and impact of grant applications, publications, and dissemination. Our two countries face very similar challenges with regard to an ageing population and joint research will automatically have a greater international impact.

This grant reflects the two groups' substantial commitment to palliative care and provides both new funds and in-kind provision. UTS has provided funding for two full-time PhD studentships to match those funded by the University of Hull, to start in 2019 and 2020.

UTS’s “in kind” contribution will allow time from IMPACCT academics to participate in the proposed exchange program and joint supervision/teaching commitments. This time will be provided both during visits to the University of Hull and as remote collaborative working.

IMPACCT staff at all levels will be involved in face-to-face visits, from Professorial (Phillips, Agar, Parker [Currow already has a substantive appointment at the University of Hull]), senior lecturer (Luckett), postdoctoral researcher (Kochovska) through to the PhD students. This five-year exchange program commenced in August 2019.