Interventions at the end of life - social, comparative and historical analysis to promote global improvement . (360G-Wellcome-103319_Z_13_A)

Care for people at the end of life has become a pressing humanitarian issue for the 21st century. Yet it is also a contested space - the focus of divided opinion, conflicting professional standpoints, fragile clinical evidence and competing models of delivery. Population ageing, changing patterns of mortality and morbidity and the growing prevalence of chronic disease present growing challenges for the development of end of life care. Recent issues concerning the Liverpool Care Pathway indicate that palliative care may prove difficult to 'roll out' across health care systems and can generate unexpected reactions. This project will develop a comprehensive analysis of the emergent field of end of life care in order to understand how interventions are developed, implemented and assessed - and with what consequences. It will take a global perspective to examine approaches of varying types and characteristics, across differing resource settings - first to build a typology of interventions and then to conduct in-depth case studies of selected examples. The project will draw on comparative, methods and interdisciplinary approaches, making use of theoretical perspectives from the social sciences and humanities to open up new lines of innovation in policy and practice. It will have a strong focus on public engagement and the use of social media - both to capture new data and to disseminate project findings. This study will transform the field - generating new theoretical proposition s and empirical knowledge that will lead to more sustainable and appropriate end of life interventions, across cultures and settings.