GiveCare – Gender- and diversity sensitive holistic end-of-life care

Palliative care is a holistic care and support concept for accompanying people with incurable, life-threatening, and/or progressive illnesses. The aim is to enable people to live and die with dignity in the final phase of their lives (end-of-life care) and to maintain or improve the quality of life of patients and their caregivers. This can be achieved through appropriate care that takes medical, psychological, sociocultural, and spiritual aspects into account.

Nevertheless, structural and systemic inequalities can mean that not all patients and their caregivers have equal access to high-quality end-of-life care and support. From a research perspective, there is only limited knowledge available in this regard as to the extent to which, for example, gender and diversity aspects and other dimensions of inequality hinder access to holistic palliative care and how these factors can be addressed in nursing and medical care practice.

The cross-border research project “GiveCare” addresses these research gaps and explores how these aspects influence palliative care at the end of life. Researchers from Switzerland and Germany are pursuing a multi-level approach that takes individual, interpersonal, organizational, and systemic perspectives into account and is based on intersectionality. In the course of the research process, practices and care and support processes at the end of life in various settings in the health and care sector will be examined from different perspectives.

The knowledge gained will be directly incorporated into practice, policy, education, and training of professionals. This will contribute to a fundamental and comprehensive understanding of gender and diversity aspects in palliative care.

The research project will receive a total of three years of project funding as part of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) National Program 83 “Gender Medicine and Health” (NFP 83, link: https://www.nfp83.ch/en).