8th World Research Congress of the European Association for Palliative Care

European Association for Palliative Care (EAPC) was established in 1988 after an initiative by professor Vittoria Ventafridda and the Floriana Foundation in Milan, Italy. The aim was to promote palliative care in Europe, for health care providers and others who take an interest in palliative care. In 2013 the EAPC represents thousands of members all over Europe, both individual and collective.

In 1996 the EAPC Research Network (EAPC RN) was founded by Franco de Conno. Within palliative care there was a need for pan-European multicentre studies in order to conduct research with sufficiently sized patient cohorts, and the RN became important for joint efforts within this area.

The EAPC world research congresses have been arranged every other year since the first congress in Berlin in 2000. Since then they have steadily grown larger, both with regards to participants and submitted abstracts, and is now the most important meeting place for palliative care researchers. At the congress cutting edge research from a variety of professions is presented and discussed in the sessions, but just as important are the informal meetings taking place outside the lecture halls.

At the last congress in Trondheim in 2012, 1172 participants from 49 countries attended and a record of 678 abstracts were submitted.