Going public: Integrating Palliative Care, Health Promotion and Public Health in Sweden Through the DöBra Research Program Seminar

Event details

Joint hosted by Health Work and Systems and Complex Healthcare Processes Research Groups at Health Sciences, University of Southampton. Abstract for the seminar: Public health approaches to end-of-life (EoL) research and care are relatively rare in Sweden and health promoting palliative care (HPPC) remains a foreign concept for most. Issues related to dying are often taboo, with people generally ill-prepared for encounters with death and unable to advocate for quality care at the end-of-life (EoL); this may be reflected in the low scores given Sweden for community engagement in the recently published 2015 Quality of Death index. We recently consolidated our HPPC endeavors into a cohesive research program, DöBra (a pun meaning both 'dying well' and 'awesome' in Swedish) to promote constructive change and awareness to support better quality of life and death among the general population, in specific subgroups and in interventions directed to professional groups caring for dying individuals, their friends and families. The program is based on ideas from new public health and the Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion as an umbrella theoretical framework and action research as an overarching methodological approach. While most action-research projects work with clearly delineated populations or settings, in DöBra we aim to achieve change in communities in the broadest sense. In this presentation we therefore focus on the particular challenges we encounter in conducting stringent research when trying to catalyze, rather than control, change processes. We will share ideas, experiences and reflections from several specific projects in the research program, discussing strategies we have used to bring together a range of stakeholders to exchange ideas and expertise, and to co-create experience-based evidence through innovative approaches. We will also address some potential possibilities and concerns in utilizing new technologies for such research in the future.