Palliative care is an approach that helps people live their life as fully and as comfortably as possible when confronted with a serious illness. Despite substantial progress over the past decades, there are still several challenges as a result of the increasing number of people who will need palliative care for a longer period, while the professional workforce is limited. There is growing realization that it will not be sufficient to solely engage more professional caregivers in palliative care and improve health services. Complementary strategies are needed.

A broad capacity development in palliative care across society offers a new promising paradigm. This implies enhancing the assets of individuals (e.g. patients themselves, informal carers), communities and organizations who have the potential to improve the experience of living with and dying from a serious illness.

This Palliative Care Researtch  project will do so by addressing an overall scientific aim: To develop and evaluate innovative interventions for broad capacity-development around palliative care by better understanding and using the existing capacity and potential.