Research in Palliative Care is growing and providing the data needed to establish evidence-based practice for palliative care. In a recent GeriPal Pod Cast, Drs. Alex Smith and Eric Widera interview authors of abstracts who presented 3 randomized clinical trials at the recent AAHPM/HPNA Annual Assembly. “One marker of the distance we’ve traveled in palliative car is the blossoming evidence base for the field. Ten years ago, we would have been hard pressed to find 3 clinical trial abstracts submitted to the annual meeting, much less high-quality randomized trials with robust measures, sample sizes, and analytics plans” comments Alex Smith MD in the podcast notes.
Funding may contribute to the limited number of randomized clinical trials. That may be about to change. In a recent blog from the Coalition to Transform Advanced Care (C+TAC), $12.5 million dollars in federal funding has been made available to the National Institute on Aging (NIA) for palliative care research. It is “expected to be awarded to researchers to expand the evidence base for palliative care services across care settings, populations and disease types.”
In the past, there has been funding from federal organizations, along with local and national philanthropic organizations, but “this is the first dedicated effort by federal government to fund and coordinate research on palliative care services and the person-centered techniques in this area of care. This research has the opportunity to further create the business case for the effectiveness of palliative care services and to demonstrate its clinical effectiveness when provided alongside the treatment available to people with serious illness.”
As research grows, so hopefully will opportunities to grow and support palliative care programs and services for people living with serious illness at the federal level. CTAC provides additional information on the impact of Federal FY24 and Proposed FY25 funding on Serious Ill which can be found here.
