Happy New(ish) Year everyone!

To celebrate we are starting a new segment.  It goes without saying that many people and groups around our region are doing wonderful and exciting work in palliative care research but it can feel a little lonely out there for many of us.  Finding support to develop your idea, and others with a similar interest can be a challenge.  In addition to the palliverse researcher database we thought another way for us all to feel connected was to start to get to know the more established players.  So let’s start with some introductions.  We have been contacting the various academic and research institutions working in palliative research in our region asking them to tell us a little bit about themselves.  “Tour of the teams” will be an ongoing series to bring the responses from these units together.

An actual “tour” was unfortunately deemed impractical

We hope that the “Tour” will help us all be a little more connected and maybe to give us all some ideas of where we can get help to develop that great research idea that we have been sitting on.

The service who gets the gold star for being first off the mark is the ImPaCCT group

Improving Palliative Care through Clinical Trials (ImPaCCT)
ImPaCCT is a research collaborative in palliative care that has been funded by the Cancer Institute NSW since 2010. ImPaCCT’s Management Advisory Committee (MAC) includes researchers from several NSW universities and clinicians from Sydney, Newcastle and the ACT, and can provide bio-statistical support and consumer advice to approved projects. While ImPaCCT is funded to develop and recruit to clinical trials, the MAC will also support preliminary work required to develop and pilot interventions or methods
for evaluation. Clinicians and researchers are invited to submit their research ideas for support by ImPaCCT or to bring proposals along to an ImPaCCT concept development workshop to discuss its design and methods. ImPaCCT also tries, wherever possible, to accommodate people interested in undertaking a higher degree or trainee research project in palliative care.
Particular areas of research expertise and interest (including specific research projects) or the eligibility criteria of specific grants and scholarships administered

ImPaCCT is developing a portfolio of research in the following areas:
Symptom assessment and management
Patient-medical team communication and advance care planning
Service delivery models across the full range of healthcare settings, including aged care.

Contact details
For more information, please contact ImPaCCT’s Program Coordinator, Dr Tim Luckett, via t.luckett@unsw.edu.au or 02 9514 4861

If anyone has an interest in being involved in the “Tour of the teams” through providing us with ideas of who should be represented then please let us know.  If you work for a research unit and would like to be involved in the tour we would love to hear from you.