Churchill Fellowship announces 134 new Fellows for 2024 – 12 of which relate to Palliative Care

I am a consultant in palliative medicine working for NHS Tayside in Scotland. I have worked in the speciality of palliative medicine for over 20 years and I am passionate about improving palliative and end-of-life care for people with advanced kidney disease. These patients have complex physical and psychological symptoms which are equitable to people with cancer; however, they do not have the same access to palliative care and often have poor end-of-life care.

I have developed a service in Scotland where palliative care is well integrated with renal medicine and I have been collaborating with international colleagues in this area. Through this work I have learnt more about areas where palliative care and renal medicine are integrated well; renal doctors receive training in palliative medicine, so that they are able to deliver good symptom control and good end-of-life care for their patients.

I am going to spend time in the USA and Australia so that I can learn more about how integrated services are developed and I hope to then improve training in renal supportive care for trainee doctors in the UK.

A physiotherapist by background, I am currently working as Specialist Palliative Care Service Lead in the Southern Health and Social Care Trust, Northern Ireland. This role involves managing the Community Specialist Palliative Care Team as well as being the Palliative Care Service Improvement Lead.

From an early stage in my career, I have had a keen interest in palliative care, helping to support people with life limiting conditions achieve quality of life. My Fellowship will investigate new ways of working to look at enhancing the specialist palliative care provision within the Southern Health and Social Care Trust and across Northern Ireland during the out-of-hours period in all areas, including rural areas.

I have been passionate about improving the provision of palliative care in the UK since I qualified as a social worker in 2022. After gaining professional experience at Princess Alice Hospice in Surrey, I was awarded a PhD studentship to research trauma-informed palliative care at Lancaster University.

Through my practice and studies, I have become increasingly aware of the psychological complexities of end of life, including the desires we express about where we want to die. Research suggests that most people would prefer to die at home, yet fear and lack of resources often prevents this. Many practitioners and policymakers have advocated for creating ‘compassionate communities’ to help address these gaps, but more momentum is needed.

In Taipei, Taiwan, palliative care specialists have recently rolled out a successful compassionate communities programme involving intergenerational initiatives. This will give me fresh perspectives on how the UK can harness existing social networks, enable collaborative leadership and employ creative ways of working to improve the end-of-life experience for all.

I am a Registered Nurse, qualified Specialist Practitioner in the home, DistrictNnurse, Queen’s Nurse and Nurse Prescriber. I spent ten years in the national leadership team with the Chief Nursing Officer for the National Health Service (NHS) England. In 2023, for the 75th birthday of the NHS, I was listed among the 75 nurses whose work has had a significant impact on the NHS between 1948 and 2023. The Queen’s Nursing Institute has awarded me a prestigious fellowship.

My Fellowship explores palliative and end-of-life care (PEOLC), compassionate communities and community nursing for people and families receiving PEOLC, to enable people to be cared for in their chosen place of death. We are still getting this wrong in England and need to harness our communities’ kindness and compassion.

As a district nurse and national leader for the NHS, I have a direct professional interest and experience with PEOLC at home and I understand the current and future challenges of operating as a system. I hope to explore compassionate communities as a model of care that views the community as an integral part of the care delivery with community nurses.

I am an acute oncology and cancer of unknown primary (CUP) nurse consultant. Cancer of unknown primary (CUP) is a cancer that has spread (metastasized) but the primary site cannot be found despite extensive testing. It is the sixth most common cause of cancer death in the UK, but many people have never heard about it.

My Fellowship explores managing uncertainty and providing psychological and emotional support for patients with CUP. I will learn from the Australian SUPER NEXT team as they have focused on not only improving diagnostic techniques, genomic testing and treatments but also the psychological impact of CUP. They have a wide network of experts across Australia who work closely together to ensure the best support for patients with CUP, despite the geographical challenges.

I have seen at first hand the psychological impact the uncertainty of a CUP diagnosis brings and the devastating effects on patients and their families. I am passionate to learn and improve this for people with CUP, then to share this learning with other professions and create a CUP expert network to improve the equity and quality of care for people with CUP in the UK.

I am a medical mediator, practising independently and with the UK’s Medical Mediation Foundation. My Fellowship project involves researching communication protocols to prevent and resolve conflict in paediatric palliative and end-of-life care. My aim is to reduce the need for legal proceedings in resolving disagreements about the care and treatment of critically ill children.

As a mediator, I work with families and healthcare professionals to facilitate conversations that promote mutual decision-making about the care and treatment of unwell children and adults. Conflicts in health and social care are devastating for patients, families and professionals, especially when they involve a child with a life-limiting condition.

I intend to learn from paediatric palliative care professionals and mediators in India, Peru and South Africa about how death and dying are discussed with families and how conflict is prevented or de-escalated. Additionally, I hope to gain insights into various cultural, religious and spiritual perspectives on dying to help professionals become more culturally informed and inclusive to all families.

I am Deputy Head of Quality and Clinical Governance at Marie Curie, London. I will be researching a community-based model of scaffolding community capacity to support resource poor minoritised and marginalised palliative care patients and their family caregivers for a more equitable and culturally anchored palliative care and bereavement support provision in the UK.

I am a family caregiver with the lived experience of material hardship, social isolation and intra-cultural stigmatisation of chronic and complex co-morbidities. As a single earner working two jobs to provide for my family, I know the often unexpressed plight of the resource poor caregiver in minoritised and marginalised communities. As a public health nurse prescriber and a palliative care nurse, I have worked extensively with these communities. As a nurse researcher and a palliative care social justice advocate, I feel deeply called to address current health inequities. I aim to build a socio-economically and culturally concordant community-based peer support model for dying and bereavement.

I am an adult speech and language therapist working in specialist palliative care. My Fellowship looks at how people with communication difficulties are supported to make decisions at the end of life. It is not common for speech and language therapists to work within specialist palliative care teams. This means that there is an unmet and often unknown need for those who have difficulties communicating to receive the specialist support they require in order to participate in conversations about their wishes and care.

I hope to take inspiration from other countries in how they support people with communication difficulties due to life limiting diseases to partake in and make choices about their care, with an aim to improve participation, services and awareness within the UK.

I am an Associate Clinical Nurse Specialist, working with Greenwich and Bexley Community Hospice. I have always been interested in Kerala’s palliative care services and how they support people across a wide geographical area, sometimes with limited resources and staffing. I am keen to learn more about how they engage local communities, particularly volunteers, to support people with life-limiting conditions.

In the UK, Marie Curie states that 75% of the week is ‘out of hours’; in addition to this, specialist palliative care services can vary depending on postcode. I would like to learn from communities in Kerala to see how the UK could improve cultural understanding of death and dying and volunteer engagement to support people living at home with a life-limiting condition.

I currently work as a Dementia Care Manager for the UK’s largest care home provider, HC One. I am also founder and Chair of Dementia Dreammakers Sheffield, a not-for-profit organisation facilitating life-enhancing experiences for people with dementia. I graduated from the University of Sheffield in 2017 with an MA in Dementia Studies.

My Fellowship focuses on empowering the families and loved ones of people living with dementia to provide emotional and psychological support at the end of their lives. My professional experience in dementia-specific services has highlighted how our approach to end-of-life dementia care is often medically driven and lacks a fully holistic approach to prioritise the emotional and psychological wellness of both the dying person and their loved ones.

I hope this Fellowship will influence end-of-life dementia care policy both locally and nationally to improve the experiences of people dying with dementia.

I am an Associate Professor of Palliative Medicine at University College London. I will research systems and frameworks for fair access to good palliative care when people are living with severe and enduring mental illness and facing challenges associated with life-threatening physical illness.

As a practising doctor as well as a researcher, my concern for people living with severe and enduring mental illness initially arose from my clinical experiences of challenges when trying to meet the palliative care needs of this group. I am travelling to North America (the USA and Canada) and Australia to learn from places that are engaged in innovative ways to practice healthcare, transform systems using relationship-centred approaches and design evaluations that capture what matters most to people in need.

I hope to apply my Fellowship learning by working with people throughout UK palliative care systems, including policymakers, charities and the NHS. I will share examples of best practice and a framework for reframing choice and risk, thinking about whole system effectiveness not just as what is safe but also what is good.