Kathrin Woitha is a German native and research assistant within the Institute for Culture and Society's ATLANTES research group at the University of Navarra. She defended her doctoral thesis, "Quality Indicators for the Organisation of Palliative Care in Europe," at Radboud University Medical Center (Netherlands). Carlos Centeno, principal investigator of the ATLANTES program, was present at the defense.

The studies included in her thesis were undertaken in the Department of Anesthesiology, Pain and Palliative Medicine at the aforementioned Dutch center. They were co-financed by a grant for "Best practices in palliative care" from the European Commission's Consumer, Health and Food Executive Agency.

In the first part of the thesis, Organisation of palliative care, Woitha provides an overview of some of the foundational analytical steps for understanding the organization of palliative care and for identifying potential quality indicators to describe it.

In addition, the introduction focuses on the continuous development of palliative care and refers to the fact that palliative care is a relatively recent medical area that in several European countries is not yet supported by structural health policy supported by the respective health ministries.

Evaluation and quality improvement

In this research, between 2008 and 2010, different models for the organization of palliative care and many of its features were summarized and reviewed. In this process, an international glossary developed by a team at the Radboud University Medical Center played an important role in that it collects terminology surrounding quality indicators, in order to establish standards for understanding the terms used in different research projects.

The second part, Development of quality indicators for the organisation of palliative care, addresses the development of specific indicators for the evaluation of said organization. As Dr. Woitha explained, the starting point was the 2003 European Council declaration that ‘‘the definition and adoption of indicators of good palliative care assessing all dimensions of care from the perspective of the patient should be encouraged''

"In 2009," as Dr. Woitha further explained, "the Council of Europe again stressed and promoted the development of QIs for monitoring progress in patient care and the organization of healthcare. Until then, there had been no clear definitions regarding the quality of the structure and process for the organization of PC settings and services and how this quality should be evaluated or improved."