What We Do

The Center for Research on End of Life Care was established in 2014 to improve the quality of life and care provided to patients and families confronting life-threatening illness and death. The Center motto “Putting Research into Action” guides its mission to generate knowledge, techniques, and tools to improve medical care of seriously ill patients and the people who love them.

The Center has had remarkable success in its first two years of existence. It obtained over $12 million dollars in NIH Funding for grants ranging from a seven-year Outstanding Investigator award, to large multi-site prospective studies, exploratory and small grants, and scientist development awards from our core faculty members. To date five medical students have been awarded grants to receive research training on projects as varied as studies of the severity of suffering and challenges to effective symptom management in the Intensive Care Unit, to studies of ways to improve physician communication about patient prognosis and test results, and research to enhance the quality of life and adjustment of family caregivers and bereaved survivors.

Resources

Living Memory Home

An immersive journaling experience meant to set you at ease while you reminisce about your loved one.

Finding Our Way

A bereavement resource developed in the height of the Covid-19 pandemic with web-based activities built to help with coping.

Grief Intensity Scale

After answering a few simple prompts, patients can assess their risk for prolonged grief disorder and identify if they should seek assistance from a mental health professional.

For clinicians, we offer brief, instructive tutorials to assist in making differential diagnoses for bereavement reactions. These include video-clips of standardized patients who describe their bereavement reactions.

Interactive Prolonged Grief Disorder Assesment

For multilingual PG-13-R, visit Assessments and Tools.

View the Validation of the DSM criteria for PG-13-R from World Psychiatry publication.

Request PG-13-R for your study or practice

Stay in touch. Let us know which study/practice you are using PG-13 for. Submit a request to download our most popular and robust diagnostic tool for free.

Resources for Clinicians

This library of educational videos can guide clinicians through sample interactions with patients suffering from various stages of grief.

For researchers, we offer several of our psychometrically validated measures that were developed and tested in NIH-funded research. These include our PG-13 measure that maps onto diagnostic criteria for Prolonged Grief Disorder, versions in multiple languages, versions for terminally ill patients and their family caregivers, and versions for children and young adults. We also have measures of USAcculturation, our measure of Stressful Caregiving Adult Reactions to Experiences of Dying (SCARED), our Peace and Equanimity in the Cancer Experience (PEACE) scale, The Human Connection (THC) scale, the Yale Evaluation of Suicidality Scale, and the Partner Dependency Scale, among other measures.

These tools have been published in peer-reviewed journals and are available free for download and use in ongoing and future research projects.

Projects in Development

Living Memory Home for Dementia Care Pairs

An adaptation of the existing Living Memory Home with expanded features and activities for Dementia Care Pairs to enjoy together.

Simpatico

A chatting application which invites users to chat with a matched other who has experienced a great personal loss of the same nature.

Research

Caring for people with intellectual disabilities at the end of life

People with intellectual disabilities face significant discrimination and may receive substandard medical care. The below videos are a resource for students and clinicians to learn more about caring for this population at the end of life and improve their clinical skills.