The Lien Centre for Palliative Care is delighted to welcome you to its Inaugural Conference in Singapore which will be held from 17-18 Oct 2012 at the Grand Copthorne Waterfront Hotel. There is a growing recognition that palliative care plays an increasingly vital role in healthcare, and the need for a strong research evidence base is essential to informing the development of palliative care in all settings. Therefore, the theme for this inaugural conference is "Engaging Research to Advance Palliative Care".

Dr Terry Flynn will present a 1-day workshop will be held on 19 Oct 2012 at Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School on preference elicitation methods in palliative care research. This workshop should interest academics, researchers and policymakers. 

Workshop Program Title: Eliciting Patient and Public Preferences in Palliative Care: The Use of Stated Preference Approaches

Workshop Program Details: Clinical evidence suggests many people do not receive end-of-life care consistent with their preferences. Advance Care Plans offer a solution, but these typically require long interviews, making them difficult to scale up to the population level. Thus, quantitative data to guide clinicians and policymakers as to respondents’ wishes under the large number of possible scenarios are frequently lacking. Furthermore, preferences elicited using category rating (likert) scales are known to be vulnerable to response styles that are often cultural-specific but unrelated to the outcome of interest. Discrete choice experiments (DCEs) and certain conjoint techniques address both issues by (1) presenting a manageable number of “what if?” scenarios that use statistical designs to draw inferences across a much larger number of possible situations, (2) eliciting responses that are consistent with real clinical practice (“accept/reject treatment”).

This course will draw on three end-of-life DCEs to provide training in the design, implementation and analysis of DCEs. It will focus on novel best-worst techniques that are increasingly used to elicit attitudes and segment populations. No prior experience or knowledge of DCEs is required. The course tutor, Dr Terry Flynn, is a world expert in these techniques and in their application to end-of-life care.

The course will be of particular use to researchers and practitioners working in palliative/end-of-life care with interest in any of the following issues:

• Greater use of decision support tools to aid decision-making by patients and clinicians
• Ensuring that attitudinal data and expressed patient preferences for palliative care reflect true patient views and not cultural-specific response styles
• Shortening advance care planning interviews to a length that enables them to be scaled up to the population, without sacrificing information
• Understanding how likely a given individual is to accept/refuse treatment under a variety of different clinical scenarios
• Measuring quality of supportive care and quality of life in a quantitative framework among patients receiving palliative care
• Estimating willingness to pay for features of palliative and end-of-life care to aid pricing of social insurance schemes