Participatory Research in Palliative Care

Jo Hockley currently works as a nurse consultant leading the Care Home Project Team at St Christopher's Hospice, London, where she has been working since 1978. She has set up two hospital-based palliative care teams - one at St Bartholomew's Hospital, London and one at the Western General Hospital, Edinburgh. Since 2000, Jo has been concentrating on developing a palliative care approach for care homes. She undertook a PhD at the University of Edinburgh using action research to study death and dying in nursing care homes. This work underpins her current work in London, implementing the Gold Standards Framework in care homes across five primary care trusts. Jo is also involved in two research projects: a trial looking at the facilitation of developing end of life skills for staff in nursing care homes and an action evaluation of the NAMASTE CARE programme for people with advanced dementia in nursing homes. Jo is an editor of the End of Life Care Journal and has published widely on palliative care. Katherine Froggatt qualified as a Registered Nurse in London following the completion of her Geography degree at Durham University. She worked in radiotherapy and the care for older people before moving into research in both university and hospital settings undertaking research and practice development in the areas of oncology and palliative care. Her interests in the care for older people, dementia, and palliative care have led her to undertake several projects concerned with care homes, end of life care, and public education using ethnographic and participatory research approaches. She currently works at the International Observatory on End of Life Care in the Faculty of Health and Medicine at Lancaster University. Katharina Heimerl studied and now practices medicine in Austria and holds a licence as General Practitioner. She has a Master's degree in Public Health from the University of California at Berkeley. She joined the Faculty for Interdisciplinary research and Education (IFF) in Vienna in 1995 where she undertook her 'Habilitation' (PhD) in 2006 in the field of palliative care and organization development. From 2010 she has been Head of the Department of Palliative Care and Organizational Ethics at the IFF, University Klagenfurt in Vienna.