Focus
- Arts and Culture
- Children
- Education and training
- Health services and health promotion
- Hospice
- Mental health
- Policy and advocacy
- Services for older people
- Social inclusion
- Volunteering
Interest
- Development of education and training materials and programmes
- European learning networks and exchanges
- Community outreach and engagement
- Cultural and artistic innovation
- Policy, advocacy and campaigns
- Research
EU Project Experience
No experience
No EU funding experience to date. Although we have limited experience in applying for EU funding, our organisation is an active partner in a number of European specialist networks and we have experience in leading the coordination of Europe-wide events, for example the European Grief Conference in November 2024, hosted in Dublin.
EU Funding Goals
Over the next 5 years Irish Hospice Foundation are keen to grow our European networks and to partner on EU funded projects with organisations who share our values and our vision.
We are particularly interested in partnering on shared learning opportunities, research consortia and collaborative projects that align with our three core strategic priorities: 1) Conversations about death 2) End of life 3) Bereavement and grief.
Strenghts
We are a research-active organisation, with particular strengths in education and advocacy.
We fund and deliver vital services including Nurses for Night Care, the freephone Bereavement Support Line, and our newly established Information and Support Line, which launched in October 2024 as a response to qualitative research highlighting the need for information on end of life care, advance care planning and palliative care.
We champion the delivery of hospice principles across all settings, from acute hospitals, to residential care settings, to the home, and we advocate for expanded access to palliative care for those living with non-malignant conditions.
We also promote discussion of a broad range of issues related to dying, death and bereavement, in order to identify what matters most to Irish people at the end of life and how best to address their concerns. We are passionate about end of life and advance care planning and offer leadership in this area through our popular Think Ahead Planning Pack. We have wide-reaching impact in the areas of end-of-life care and bereavement across a variety of healthcare settings as well as home.
In 2024, we delivered the following:
- Funded 3,120 nights of support through Nurses for Night Care - providing night nursing care, practical support and reassurance for the person and their loved ones in the last days of their life.
- Answered 1,181 calls to our Bereavement Support Line - a national freephone service offering connection, comfort and support for anyone who is bereaved or concerned about someone else who is grieving.
- Supported 21 End-of-Life Care Coordinators, across 33 hospitals with training and resources.
- 48 students completed our postgraduate programmes in loss & bereavement including MSc in Loss and Bereavement and Postgraduate Certificate in Childhood Loss.
- Welcomed 6,860 attendees across our range of training events in the areas of best end-of-life and bereavement care.
- Facilitated Final Journeys training for 2,572 Healthcare professionals in 46 hospitals.
- Distributed 11,500 Think Ahead packs for advance care planning to help people think about, talk about and record their choices, values, and preferences for their care at end of life.
- Launched an Information and Support Line providing information and resources to healthcare professionals and the public on end-of-life care, advance care planning and palliative care.
Our work is informed by evidence based, responsive and innovative policy positions, strategic relationships where we work in partnership with others to identity and develop solutions and quality research to support the development of our programmes of work.
