The End-of-Life Care Research Group

Monitoring quality of End-of-Life Care (MELC) is a four-year collaborative research and valorization project involving seven academic research groups. The research is financially supported as a Strategic Basic Research project (SBO) by the Institute for the Promotion of Innovation by Science and Technology in Flanders (IWT).

The number of elderly people is rapidly increasing in Western countries. Technological developments in diagnostic techniques and therapeutic possibilities have increased the life duration of the terminally ill. As a consequence, medical decisions to begin various supportive-care technologies lead to more decisions which may have potentially lifeshortening effects.

In recent studies, medical decisions involving a possible life-shortening effect have been estimated to be the cause of about 40% of all deaths in Flanders as well as in other European countries.

Starting up various supportive care technologies towards the end of life implies ethical dilemmas for the patient, his or her family and the care providers. Although there is a great need to identify the barriers that hamper the delivery of good end-of-life care, it appears that in the terminally ill, the delivery of end-of-life care and the palliative treatment of symptoms have been poorly studied and evaluated.

Although mortality is traditionally one of the most reliable health indicators, the quality of end-of-life care has been poorly evaluated in Western countries. Therefore, this research group aims at developing quality indicators of end-of-life care, as well as systems to monitor the (development of the) quality of this care. The group’s goal is to develop these indicators for the overall society, but also across care settings as well as across patient populations. This project is one of the first SBO-projects that hired a full time coordinator for science communication and valorization.

Vrije Universiteit Brussel – End-of-Life Care Research GroupHead: Luc DELIENS
Laarbeeklaan 103
Building K – 2nd floor
1090 Brussels – Belgium
[T] +32 (0)2 477 47 57
[F] +32 (0)2 477 47 57
[W] www.endoflifecare.be