Our research partnerships

We work with a wide range of organisations to share knowledge, increase funding and spread best practice in palliative and end of life care research.

We're working with Alzheimer’s Society to fund up to £1 million of research that can improve the end of life experience for people with any form of dementia, and for those who care for and support them. 

We worked with the James Lind Alliance and many other partners in 2014/15 to identify and prioritise research questions from the point of view of patients, carers and health and social care professionals.

10 years on, we're leading a refresh of the Palliative and end of life care Priority Setting Partnership (PeolcPSP) with the James Lind Alliance to determine whether research priorities have changed.

This partnership is allowing us to hear from people living with a terminal illness, families and carers, and health and social care professionals to find out the most important issues in end of life care that we need to address through research.

The current project is again co-funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and the Motor Neurone Disease Association.

We're pleased to be a knowledge partner of the Churchill Fellowship. The Churchill Fellowship is a UK charity which supports individual UK citizens to follow their passion for change, through learning from the world and bringing that knowledge back to the UK. Previous projects have explored areas such as how to support children with dying parents, or help end of life carers who are in employment. Read more about the latest cohort of fellows in palliative care.

We've been working with the Motor Neurone Disease Association since 2014, when the association was a co-funder of the first palliative and end of life care priority setting partnership. As a result, we developed a multi-year co-funding partnership to support research in palliative and end of life care for people affected by MND.

For example, we've co-funded research to develop the DIAMoND tool, a decision aid which helps people with the disease decide whether or not to have a gastrostomy tube.

Our work with the MND Association also helped adapt the Carers Need Support Tool (CSNAT-I) which has gone on to be used to assess the needs and tailor support of carers of people living with many different life-limiting conditions.

Marie Curie believes that research findings obtained with Marie Curie funding should be published open access and free for everybody, be it practitioners or people with lived experience.

To support this aim, we're one of a number of research funders across Europe who support Europe PMC. This open access platform for health-related research supports our aim to make sure research publications are freely available for anyone and everyone.

We've partnered with the Scottish Government's Chief's Scientist Office (CSO)  to fund research on improving end of life care for people in Scotland as a result of the first Palliative and end of life Care Priority Setting Partnership.

We co-funded a project with the CSO, aimed at understanding how best to support people in Scotland with palliative and end-of-life care needs “out of hours”.

This initiative brings together hospices, health and social care organisations and universities from across Ireland and Northern Ireland.

As a funding member through the Marie Curie Hospice, Belfast, we're working together to focus on education, research and practice that can help improve palliative care services.

Marie Curie is an NIHR Research Delivery Network (RDN) Non-commercial Partner. This means the studies that we fund may be eligible to access the NIHR Study Support Service which is provided by the NIHR Research Delivery Network within the NHS, and the wider public health and social care environment, across England.  

We've also partnered with the NIHR to undertake a portfolio snapshot of research funded by both organisations, the two largest funders of palliative and end of life care in the UK, in 2011-2018/19.

We're a member of the Association of Medical Research Charities (AMRC), which is a network of charities that support medical and health-related research in the UK.

AMRC provides guidelines on peer review to help us ensure our research management processes follow best practice. The annual data collection by AMRC from members shows the vital role member charities play in the UK life sciences and economy.

We're committed to making research available to everyone and results of research funded by participating charities is made quickly and freely available. We've collaborated with AMRC partners and F1000 to support the publishing platform called Health Open Research.