Federal lawmakers recently allocated millions of dollars to fuel palliative care research efforts. The move is anticipated to expand palliative education and career development opportunities as demand rises in coming years.
Congress recently passed the 2024 Labor Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, and Related Agencies Appropriation Bill. Introduced in July 2023, the appropriation included $12.5 million in funding to “focus, expand and intensify” palliative care research and workforce development efforts, the bill’s language stated.
The funds support the development and implementation of a national multi-disease strategy that will grow palliative care research programs at institutions across the country, according to the National Institute on Aging (NIA), a division of the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services’ (HHS) National Institutes of Health (NIH). The funding will allow for palliative research projects that may not have been otherwise possible, the NIA stated.
“We expect that this support will, in many cases, stimulate new areas of science related to palliative care, including training and career development, pilot and exploratory studies, implementation and dissemination research and provision of research resources,” the agency told Hospice News in an email.
The appropriations included in Fiscal Year 2024 are expected to cover two years of palliative care training and career development initiatives.
The NIA will work in concert on these initiatives with other NIH institutes, centers, and offices, as well as partnering institutions, including the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), among others. Subject matter experts will also be involved to provide technical assistance, pilot research and data analytics projects, and offer insight on interdisciplinary palliative career development support.
The appropriations also allocated $302.47 million toward nursing workforce development programs, including those supporting interdisciplinary palliative care training “to train and strengthen the palliative care nursing workforce through existing programs and activities,” according to the legislation’s language.
Advances in palliative care research and clinical development are projected to have quality impacts for a wide range of patients and families facing chronic illness, the NIA indicated.
“We expect that this funding will translate into new knowledge to improve the quality of life and reduce distress for people across the lifespan who are living with serious illness and their families,” the NIA said. “We also expect this funding will support the development of palliative care researchers from the early stages of their careers, which will help to foster the next generation of scientists in this growing and crucial field.”
The funding comes at a time of critical need to improve care for individuals with serious illness, according to Dr. R. Sean Morrison, director at the National Palliative Care Research Center (NPCRC). Morrison is also the Ellen and Howard C. Katz Professor and chair of the Brookdale Department of Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine at Mount Sinai.
More research has been long overdue to improve clinical palliative care training models, Morrison said. The last 15 years have brought small, incremental increases in funding allocations toward palliative care research, but these pale in comparison to the need, according to Morrison.
Not enough clinicians are trained to understand the depth of serious illness pain and symptom management alongside helping patients and families walk through difficult health care decisions, Morrison stated.
“Providers do an extraordinary job with limited evidence. There’s been a critical need to enhance the evidence base of care for persons living with serious illness,” Morrison told Hospice News. “We see challenges with severe pain, breathlessness and we need to build out the workforces that provide more effective care based on successful scientific basis. It’s important that we train our future health care professionals with science – that’s the currency of the realm that helps promote the advancement of careers and truly inserts palliative care into the genome.”
A wider evidence base around palliative care outcomes and successful strategies could help establish more standardized models of care and improve health disparities among underserved seriously ill populations, Morrison said.
The recent funding could have a trifecta effect on the future delivery and sustainability of palliative care and its workforce, Morrison indicated. Greater research efforts could help support future palliative care clinicians, scientists and the expansion of more programs nationwide, he said.
“There are three key areas the research is supporting,” Morrison said. “One is the core principle of palliative care and enhancing evidence on how to appropriately treat distressing symptoms and pain. The second is around a strong focus on advanced communication research [and] the ability to address goals of care. The third area is around health services research, which means creating new models of care delivery that match the current health care environment and funding mechanisms.”
