Grant: Knowledge Translation Supplement

The Quality Palliative Care in Long-Term Care (QPC-LTC) Alliance brings 27 researchers together with 4 long-term care homes, 7 health care decision makers and 40 community organizations to improve quality of life for people who are dying in long-term care homes. Since forming in 2009 as a SSHRC funded community-university research alliance (2009-2013), the Alliance is building capacity to deliver palliative care within long-term care homes through participatory action research. The research empowers personal support workers, creates palliative care teams and brings knowledge into action by creating a tool kit of interventions that will support quality palliative care for residents, family caregivers and long-term care home staff. Through this application to CIHR, the Alliance seeks to translate and disseminate the generated knowledge to national and international stakeholders in multiple ways: through enhancing our website (www.palliativealliance.ca) to become a national repository of research and practical resources for developing palliative care in long-term care; through hiring an experienced knowledge broker to translate our research evidence for uptake by long-term care and community partners; through organizing a team meeting and national conference; and by forming knowledge translation partnerships with National Initiative for Care of the Elderly and Canadian Hospice Palliative Care Association to disseminate practical tools to practitioners and implement communication strategies with federal, provincial and territorial governments, policy developers, patient, family caregivers, and the general public. Tools will include organizational and clinical best practices, educational curriculum, partnership strategies and policy recommendations. Our KT proposal is founded on the Alliance's substantive 2009-2010 research findings and our well established research partnerships with long-term care homes and community organizations at the provincial and national level.