Person-Centred Care, Support Needs, Unpaid/Family Carers, Supportive Care, Palliative Care, Breathlessness in Advanced Disease

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Morag has worked in health services research for over 30 years, predominantly in palliative and supportive care. She has worked for health authorities in London, and within the universities of London, Manchester, Cambridge and East Anglia (UEA). An early graduate nurse by background (King’s College London), she holds a Masters in Medical Sociology and PhD (University of London) on the definition and measurement of quality of life in older people. Research interests include person-centred care, supportive/palliative care, unpaid/family carers, breathlessness in advanced disease, older people, and methodology – particularly the development and testing of interventions and mixed methods.

At UEA she leads a research programme on improving care and support for patients and carers living with advanced disease, including the SNAP programme, Learning about Breathlessness programme, and a programme on unpaid/family carers:

• SNAP (the Support Needs Approach for Patients): an award-winning intervention to enable person-centred care for people with chronic or progressive conditions, funded by Marie Curie: https://thesnap.org.uk
• Learning about Breathlessness (LaB) has developed a web-based educational intervention for unpaid carers of patients with breathlessness in advanced malignant and non-malignant disease: https://supporting-breathlessness.org.uk/ LaB2 was funded by an NIHR Research for Patient Benefit grant
• Unpaid/family carers:
  • The novel award-winning Carer Support Nurse role e=was developed and piloted to support unpaid/family carers with complex health and wellbing needs: https://arc-eoe.nihr.ac.uk/research-implementation/research-themes/palliative-and-end-life-care/carer-support-nurse-pilot/
  • A programme of research related to the Carer Support Needs Assessment Tool Intervention (CSNAT-I) has extended the reach of this internationally-adopted intervention to carers of patients with chronic or progressive conditions (CSNAT v3), explored its relevance for young carers and is investigating its relevance for carers from ethnic minority groups: https://csnat.org/ 

These projects build on work conducted at University of Cambridge as a Senior Research Associate and NIHR Career Development Fellow, including the Living with Breathlessness Study and the LaB1 Study (first study in the Learning about Breathlessness programme). The Living with Breathlessness Study was a collaboration between Cambridge, King’s College London and RAND Europe on patient and carer need and care preferences in advanced COPD. She was also lead researcher on the RCT of the internationally-recognised Cambridge Breathlessness Intervention Service, developed following the MRC framework for complex interventions in collaboration with Dr Sara Booth (Addenbrooke’s Palliative Care Team) and colleagues. 

Morag is theme lead for NIHR ARC East of England’s Palliative and End of Life Care theme (https://arc-eoe.nihr.ac.uk/research-implementation/research-themes/term-palliative-and-end-life-care) and co-lead for the NIHR ARC Palliative and End of Life Care National Forum (https://arc-eoe.nihr.ac.uk/leading-nihr-forum-improving-palliative-and-end-life-care-across-england)

She has collaborated and published with colleagues internationally in the field of breathlessness in advanced disease and palliative care methodology (Canada and Australia) and carer support (Sweden).

In addition Morag has a teaching role at UEA, including post-graduate supervision.

Follow this work on BlueSky: @m.farquhar.bsky.social