King's College London, University of York

Academic Institute

Irene Higginson

E065

Palliative care is the medical approach aimed at helping wellbeing, and easing pain of people at the end of their life. Covid-19 has had a large impact on health care services. 1-4% of people have died from Covid-19, with over 100,000 UK deaths. The vulnerable groups that palliative care helps, are those most affected by Covid-19. The symptoms can be painful and stressful, but most of them are not well understood. This makes it hard for palliative care workers to change how they work in response to Covid-19. What we are going to do Our research hopes to assess the palliative care response to Covid-19. In a project called CovPall we surveyed medical and nursing professionals about how they have managed and changed the way they work during Covid-19. We also collected information on patients’ symptoms and their management. We want to use national data to boost findings from CovPall. We hope to allow use of CovPall data for other research. We will assess how the response to Covid-19 affects a number of factors, looking at the following: 1. Whether the number of people dying during Covid-19 was reported correctly, or if some deaths were missed 2. The number of cases of Covid-19 in the UK population 3. The number of people admitted to hospital with Covid-19 and the number of people discharged 4. Business, financial and social impacts of Covid-19 5. How charities have supported health services and how we can capture this information 6. How we should collect palliative care information in the future, focusing on patients with more than one illness 7. We hope this project will help to improve care now and in the future. 8. We will include patients, families, the general public, and policy makers in our research.

We will look at how the response to COVID-19 has impacted: Whether the number of people dying during COVID-19 was reported correctly, or if some deaths were missed The number of cases of Covid-19 in the UK population The number of people admitted to hospital with Covid-19 and the number of people discharged Business, financial and social impacts of Covid-19 related to palliative care How charities have supported health services and how we can capture this information How we should collect palliative care information in the future, focusing on patients with more than one illness We are hoping that this project will help to improve healthcare now and in the future.

26/03/2020

Anonymous

Not applicable

Not applicable

Not applicable

One-off

TRE