The End-of-Life Care Research Group conducts high-quality scientific research in end-of-life care in Belgium and across Europe. Researchers from different scientific backgrounds work in a common research structure to facilitate interdisciplinary collaborative research, with an emphasis on optimizing the training and support of junior researchers to expand future expertise in the field.

The group aims to achieve maximum dissemination of its research findings through scientific publications, conferences, professional organizations and the popular media, contributing to the improvement of medical training and education, end-of-life care practice and organization, and political and institutional policy.

Research projects are coordinated within three main research programs. The Public Health and Palliative Care program aims to describe and understand the health, wellbeing and quality of care of populations affected by serious illness, dying and bereavement, and to evaluate what can improve or maintain these outcomes, applying a population health perspective that focuses on full populations rather than individual patients and their families. The Aging and Palliative Care program aims to generate new knowledge to better understand how to improve palliative and end-of-life care and end-of-life decision-making for older people and people with dementia and their family carers, applying and developing quantitative and qualitative research methods from the medical, social and psychological sciences. The Palliative Care for People with Cancer program aims to acquire the insights necessary to improve the quality of palliative care for cancer patients and to understand the mechanisms of early integration of palliative care into mainstream oncology treatment.