Moving Palliative and End-of-life Care Forward

May 17-21, 2010
Tory Building TB 95
University of Alberta
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

Dirk Houttekier, MA, PhD

Dirk Houttekier is a sociologist and a doctoral researcher of the End-of-Life Care Research Group at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel since 2006.

His program of research focuses on place of death and other end-of-life care issues. In cooperation with Dr. Joachim Cohen he published peer-reviewed articles on place of death in Brussels Capital Region, on variations in place of death in European metropolitan regions, and on place of death of older persons who died of dementia in Europe. Recently he finished a study about the association of the use of specialist palliative care services and place of death and he prepares studies on trends in place of death and the effectiveness of non-clinical interventions to prevent hospitalization and hospital death in older patients with chronic life-limiting conditions.

As a teaching assistant of Prof. Luc Deliens he teaches skills for doing a literature review in health care and research methods in health care research.

Dirk Houttekier is involved in the coordination centre of the International Place of Death study (IPD study), an international study examining cross-national patterns in place of death using death certificate data of several European and non-European countries.

Topic:

• The state of evidence and practice globally on “location” of death