For over three decades, Jean Kutner, MD, MSPH, distinguished professor of medicine at CU Anschutz School of Medicine, has provided and studied palliative care – specialized medical care that focuses on improving quality of life and reducing suffering for people with serious illness and their caregivers.
Yet, with an increasingly aging U.S. population and increased awareness of the needs of people across the lifespan with serious illness, many pressing questions remain about how to best provide palliative care for a growing scope of patients, caregivers and care settings.
To help fill the knowledge gap, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) last year provided CU Anschutz with a $64 million grant to fund a nationwide consortium to support palliative care research. Now, Kutner serves as contact principal investigator of the Advancing the Science of Palliative Care Research Across the Lifespan (ASCENT) Consortium, a consortium designed to generate new evidence and put those findings into practice as well as build the palliative care research workforce.
“Ultimately, we're trying to change practice – or provide the evidence needed to change practice,” Kutner said. “We have to do this work because people living with serious illness – and the people who care for them – are depending on us to generate the evidence that will make their care better.”
Here Kutner shares how the ASCENT Consortium is making strides toward improving life for people with serious illness and their caregivers.
The takeaway:
Research is lacking about which palliative care approaches work best for different patients and healthcare settings across the country. Through a $64 million NIH-funded national consortium, CU Anschutz is leading efforts to generate the evidence needed to improve quality of life for people with serious illness, strengthen care delivery across the lifespan and help research findings become standard practice.