SCPHRPs Later Life Working Group lead Daryll, is currently leading a wide-ranging scoping review project with colleagues in the Primary Palliative Care Research Group (University of Edinburgh), The Scottish Partnership for Palliative Care, St Columba’s Hospice and NHS Lothian. The scoping review aims to map the Progress and Impacts of Community Engagement in End-of-Life-Care.
Community engagement in end-of-life care is an umbrella term for a process which enables communities and services to work together to understand, build capacity and address issues to improve their experience of end-of-life and bereavement and their related well-being. In recent years, approaches to community engagement in end-of-life care have attracted interest and gradually gained momentum within UK health practice and policy, and among those who are part of and responsible for palliative care services. There is general consensus that community engagement in end-of-life care can complement and go beyond the scope of formal service models of palliative care. However, there is not widespread clarity about how these approaches can be undertaken in practice or how evidence can be gathered relating to the effectiveness of these approaches. No previous work has been done to systematically map and categorise the wide variety of activities and programmes that could be classified under the umbrella term ‘community engagement in end-of-life care’, to understand the potentially wide-ranging impact of these activities, or to explore ways in which impact has been or might be measured, thus the scoping review will address this shortfall in knowledge. A protocol for the project is currently under review at BMJ Open and the project is due for completion in October 2016.
Get in touch with Daryll at daryll.archibald@ed.ac.uk
