The University of Washington End-of-life Care Research Program is an internationally known research center in palliative and end-of-life care that has been in existence for over 10 years and has contributed to the science of measuring and improving the quality of palliative and end-of-life care. The Program is housed in a 1500 square-foot suite of offices on the Harborview Medical Center campus of the University of Washington. The Program is lead by the Dr. J.Randall Curtis and Dr. Ruth A. Engelberg. The Program team is currently funded by two R01 Awards and a K24 Award from NIH as well as additional funding from the National Palliative Care Research Center. Full-time staff of the research team include study coordinators, research nurses and data abstractors.
Dr. Curtis, the Director of the Program, is a pulmonary and critical care physician and has focused his research on measuring and improving end-of-life care for patients with acute and chronic illness. Dr. Engelberg, the Co-director of the Research Program, is an educational psychologist by training and an accomplished health services researcher with a focus on measurement and survey development.
The End-of-Life Care Research Program is a resource in a number of important areas for clinical and health services researchers. These include: 1) recruitment and retention of participants for studies addressing sensitive topics such as end-of-life care; 2) survey development and implementation; 3) management and analyses of large datasets; 4) design and implementation of complex clinical and health services research study designs including longitudinal, clustered, and repeated measures designs; 5) protection of human subjects and the development and implementation of applications for Institutional Review Boards; and 6) design and implementation of interventions in clinical practice.
Please see the links above to review Our Purpose and Program Personnel.
Please visit our “blog pages” as well for the latest news and additional information: http://depts.washington.edu/eolcare/category/blog/ .