Lara Pivodic, researcher at the End-of-Life Care Research Group, will receive the prestigious European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant from the European Union, worth €1.5 million in research funding. She will use the grant to conduct five years of fundamental research on the end-of-life trajectories of older people with serious chronic illness.
The project’s title is ‘Uncovering commonalities and differences: Towards a novel framework for identifying end-of-life trajectories of older people with serious chronic illness (TRAJECT)’. Lara Pivodic, leading a team of 3 PhD students, one post-doc researcher and a research assistant, will conduct research to gain an integrated understanding of what is generalisable and what is individually specific in older people’s end-of-life trajectories and in the circumstances that shape them. The project responds to the long-standing scientific challenge of identifying commonalities in (or types of) end-of-life trajectories that apply across groups of people, but without masking important inter-individual differences.
The research will consist of a convergent mixed method study that will integrate 1) a large quantitative longitudinal study and 2) a serial narrative interview study; both with older people (70 years or over) with serious chronic illness who are nearing the end of life. Both methods will focus on identifying commonalities as well as differences in end-of-life trajectories, each through their unique scientific lens.
The TRAJECT project will open up new perspectives on end-of-life trajectories, including new categorisations, and will shift the focus from trajectories as something that ‘happens’ to people towards a view that centers the older person as an active agent in shaping their health within given health care systems and wider social, cultural, economic, and political structures. Ultimately, these novel insights should propel scientific advances towards achieving a good end of life in ageing societies.
