We are very excited that Steven Vanderstichelen and Kim de Nooijer will continue their research in palliative care via a postdoctoral fellowship of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO).
About the FWO senior postdoctoral fellowship of Steven Vanderstichelen
Death Literacy is a set of knowledge and skills that is conceptualised to enable people to gain access to, understand, and act upon EoL care options. The idea is that it is a resource that we can use to improve or maintain our health and wellbeing when confronted with serious illness, death, dying and loss, and to increase our individual and community capacity for providing end-of-life care and support. However, we don’t yet know whether Death Literacy can deliver on this promise, nor whether there are other pathways to improving death literacy, other than direct confrontation with the end of life, in order to prepare people for these challenges. With this fellowship, I want to find out: Does Death Literacy help people and how? And how can we build it? Over the next three years, I will first build a causal model for Death Literacy based on the available evidence, and secondly test this model in a large-scale, longitudinal observational population cohort study with people with varying degrees of experience with EoL and a control group from the general public.
About the FWO junior postdoctoral fellowship of Kim de Nooijer
Participant recruitment and retention have been found to be seriously hampered in many palliative care trials. Inadequate recruitment or retention can have considerable implications such as studies not being able to detect effective palliative care interventions for patients with serious conditions and their families. The aim of this project is to identify hindering and facilitating factors as well as strategies for optimising recruitment and retention in palliative care trials. To generate evidence to realise this aim, I will use mixed methods, including 1) a multiple case study design investigating a purposive sample of trials. This will involve interviews with trialists such as research nurses and a systematic comparison of factors and strategies that may have influenced trials; and 2) a qualitative study design exploring how recruitment and retention could be improved according to patients and families, and healthcare providers from different countries. All mixed-method evidence will be triangulated resulting in an integrated evidence-based and stakeholder-informed recruitment and retention research guidance. This project will result in ground-breaking and timely knowledge on efficient recruitment and retention to ensure high-quality palliative care trials.
