Welcome to the End-Of-Life Care website.
Dear visitor to the MELC site, welcome. This is the site of the MELC (Monitoring quality of End-of-Life Care) study, a 4 year collaborative research and valorisation project involving seven academic research groups. The research is financially supported by the Institute for the Promotion of Innovation by Science and Technology in Flanders as a Strategic Basic Research project (SBO).
Technological developments in diagnostic techniques and therapeutic possibilities have increased the potential to extend the survival time of terminally ill patients. As a consequence, decision-making as to the appropriateness of the prolongation of life becomes more pertinent and medical decisions to begin, to withdraw, or to withhold different supportive care technologies increasingly involve more and more actions with potentially life-shortening effect. However, decisions to involve medical technologies at the end of life are often not taken with optimal care and are, to a great extent, a matter of luck, depending on coincidental factors. Furthermore, there is evidence that supportive care in the last days, weeks, and months of dying is far from optimal. Death often occurs after heroic and aggressive therapeutic interventions in hospitals, in sharp contrast to the wishes of most patients. Hence, there is great potential for improving the quality of dying, and thus the quality of life of terminally ill. To attain this, targeted interventions are needed, based on the rational planning of end-of-life care. Although mortality is traditionally one of the most reliable health indicators, the quality of end-of-life care is poorly evaluated in Western countries. Therefore, research is needed to develop quality indicators of end-of-life care, as well as systems to monitor the development of the quality of such care across society as a whole, across care settings and across patient populations.
The strategic aims of the study are twofold:
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to evaluate end-of-life care and end-of-life decisions in medical practice in Flanders, Belgium;
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to develop quality indicators of end-of-life care and end-of-life decisions, and investigate possible monitoring systems.
On this site, you will find a synthesis of the individual work packages of this research project, the project groups responsible for these work packages, a complete overview of all involved junior staff and senior staff, and a presentation of the results in terms of publications and valorisation. I hope that this attracts you to look further into this site.
Prof Luc Deliens, PhD, Coordinator of the MELC study