Huei Chung

Addressing the inequalities in accessing palliative care for people with intellectual disabilities should be an urgent priority. The barriers and facilitators identified in my paper are likely to be encountered by other socially disadvantaged groups. Thus policy makers and service developers have much to learn from acknowledging these. Many examples of good practice and promising initiatives were identified in my review, but tended to be small scale exceptions rather than standard practice. Future research should focus on developing measurable outcomes specifically related to people with intellectual disabilities to allow for large scale interventional studies that demonstrate these initiatives are effective. Crucially, methods that include people with intellectual disabilities and their families as participants should be adopted.

With support from my supervisors, my project was published in Palliative Medicine in June 2020. This felt like a fantastic achievement and would not have been possible without the skills and encouragement I gained from completing the MSc.

Huei Chung Pharmacist, Taiwan

I’m a pharmacist by trade in Taiwan. After completing my MSc in clinical pharmacy, I started to work as a clinical pharmacist in a public community hospital. In 2017, our hospital hosted a symposium on palliative care, and two speakers from the Cicely Saunders Institute were invited to share their experiences. This event taught me a lot about this field of research. To my knowledge, in the training process of being a competent pharmacist, I have always been taught how to use medication to treat and cure patients. However, there are not many opportunities to learn and talk about how to deal with situations when recovery is no longer possible. The concept of palliative care really blew my mind, and this curiosity led me to be a MSc student again in 2019.

The MSc programme in palliative care at Cicely Saunders Institute is well-organised and comprehensive. This course created a wonderful learning environment for everyone to share their experiences and exchange ideas. The arrangement of all modules I joined guided me to establish an overall concept of research methods, disease management, policy, epidemiology and medical ethics in palliative care, which was helpful in building my ability to conduct my own research project. The accessibility of the learning materials wasalso very convenient via the on-line platform of King's E-learning system. All faculty members were friendly and supportive, and the programme provided opportunities to meet a variety of health professionals from a diverse set of backgrounds and cultures.

The topic of my research project was a systematic review appraising evidence for palliative care needs, models of care, interventions, and outcomes in the Greater China region. This review identified 66 studies from China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan. Since palliative care provision and planning must build on existing evidence, the findings of this review can