LMS Research Internship: Palliative Care in the Emergency Department
Closing Date: 17/09/2026

The emergency department is a difficult place for patients with palliative care needs. To improve care, departments have tried having palliative care teams visit the emergency department. This is called in-reach. While it seems like a good idea, we don’t have research to understand what patients and families think about in-reach in emergency departments. We also don't know the impact in-reach has on how long patients stay in hospital. We have two studies due to start in late 2026.  

 One study will ask patients and their families who have been seen by in-reach in the emergency department what they think. We will interview patients and their families. We will use these findings to try to improve in-reach services.  

The second study aims to understand the impact of specialist palliative care ED in-reach services on hospital use and access to specialist palliative care. This will use routinely collected data linked with death registrations to assess the effect of specialist palliative care input in ED (compared to standard hospital specialist palliative care) on patient outcomes, including length of stay and unplanned re-admissions, applying instrumental variable analysis that exploits variation in service availability to examine effects. We will also run a cost analysis. we will exploit the natural variation in service availability to examine whether embedding specialist palliative care in ED improves equity of access to hospital specialist palliative care among patients likely to benefit. In a regression analysis, we will first examine whether exposure to the ED inreach service increases the odds of receiving any specialist palliative care for patients who visited the ED in the last six months of life. We will then look at interaction effects for socioeconomic position and other characteristics to examine whether the ED in-reach service reaches different populations to those reached by the hospital specialist palliative care team. This will be followed by multi-stakeholder workshops to develop a Theory of Change underpinning specialist palliative care in-reach in EDs. 

 Underpinning this work is formalising a literature review, which was conducted for the funding applications for these two studies, towards publication as a stand alone paper. 

 The main role of the successful LMS Intern on this project will be to conduct and write up a literature review on palliative care in-reach in the emergency department. The intern's main point of contact in the team will be Dr Daniel Darbyshire, an NIHR Academic Clinical Lecturer and Emergency Physician based at Lancaster Medical School. Dr Darbyshire will provide training, support, and supervision for the intern to conduct the literature review, based on the candidate's existing skills and experience. We hope that the intern will have progressed the review to the point, or close to, submission to a journal. Something, again, that they will be supported with. 

 Depending on the intern's specific learning needs and academic career aspirations, there will be opportunities to participate in other elements of the study and to attend research-focused training and education available at Lancaster University.

Working in this role will help develop the following skills and experience:

• Collaboration
• Creativity
• Curiosity
• Emotional Intelligence
• Exercising Professional Judgement
• Flexibility

You are required to submit a cover letter to support your application. Applications without a cover letter will not be considered.

Please note: Unless specified otherwise in the advert wording, this role is only open to individuals living in the UK.

Under the terms of this work, we endeavour to provide the advertised number of hours however, hours are not guaranteed and that work may cease if there is a fall in demand. 

Adverts that display a closing date should be treated as a guide. We reserve the right to close the vacancy once we have received sufficient applications, so we advise you to submit your application as early as possible to prevent disappointment.