At St Catherine’s Hospice, we’re leaders in helping people when life comes full circle and educating professionals in our field.
You can trust us to deliver pioneering standards of care at our hospice buildings and in people’s own homes, but we know there’s always more we can do.
Would you like to take part in research?
We want to make sure that the care we give is the best it can be, and so from time to time offer the people we care for the opportunity to take part in research studies.
Our research looks at how we can improve St Catherine’s physical, practical, emotional and spiritual care for people affected by a terminal illness. So far we have worked with patients, carers and staff to better understand issues including:
- What really matters to people about their care at the end of their life
- How often people with cancer get oral symptoms, like mouth pain or a dry mouth
- How illness affects people’s sleep
All of our research is ethical and robust as we follow strict guidelines including data protection and confidentiality principles.
How do I get involved in research?
Whilst we are caring for you, we may invite you to take part in a relevant study. Alternatively, if you would like to, please ask any member of the team about our current research projects and how to get involved
We also work with our academic and healthcare partners and are supporting the following research projects. If you would like to get involved in any of these, please either sign up via the links below, or ask a member of the team who will be happy to help.
Our research
Health and care research should serve the public interest, which means that we have to demonstrate that our research serves the interests of society as a whole. We do this by following the UK Policy Framework for Health and Social Care Research.
We use personally-identifiable information to conduct research to improve health and care. As a charity providing care to terminally ill people and those close to them, we have a legitimate interest in using information relating to your health and care for research studies, when you agree to take part in a research study. This means that we will use your data, collected in the course of a research study, in the ways needed to conduct and analyse the research study. Your rights to access, change or move your information are limited, as we need to manage your information in specific ways in order for the research to be reliable and accurate. If you withdraw from the study, we will keep the information about you that we have already obtained. To safeguard your rights, we will use the minimum personally-identifiable information possible.
If you wish to raise a complaint on how we have handled your personal data, you can contact our Quality Team who will investigate the matter. If you are not satisfied with our response or believe we are processing your personal data in a way that is not lawful you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) https://ico.org.uk/
Our Quality Team can be contacted at quality@stch.org.uk.
Education, Training and Development
We help our staff stay up to date by providing education and supporting personal development to make sure we’re continuing to provide people with the highest quality care, and we educate other professionals, as we know providing everyone in our local community with excellent end of life care isn’t something we can do alone. Our courses are available here.
Information about research at St Catherine’s Hospice has participated in, including recruitment data, will be included in the annual quality account which is displayed on this website.