New Chair in Palliative Care for Children and Young People

We are delighted to announce that this month Professor Ulrika Kreicbergs has taken up her post as the new Chair in Palliative Care for Children and Young People at UCL GOS ICH.

The Chair was established by the True Colours Trust in 2009 to demonstrate the need for academic leadership and to improve the evidence base for children’s palliative care.

Our hope and expectation, when establishing the Chair, was that the role would cement research into children’s palliative care as an integral part of children’s healthcare. Our aim was that that the impact of the Chair’s role would be demonstrated within our ten-year funding partnership and that the post would then become a permanent feature at ICH, supported by the institution.

The inaugural Chair, Professor Bluebond-Langner who retired in 2021, was also the first Director of the Louis Dundas Centre for Children’s Palliative Care – a centre of excellence in research, teaching and clinical practice at UCL GOS ICH – founded in memory of Louis Dundas.  The Chair is now funded by UCL ICH and by funds raised by Ruth Kennedy and the Dundas family and, as such, has been renamed the Louis Dundas Chair.  We are thrilled that GOS ICH has recognised the vital importance of a palliative care approach in work with children and young people.

We are delighted to see the baton of academic leadership at GOS ICH passed to Professor Kreicbergs, whose own vision is ‘to lead and develop a research team, with strong links to everyday clinical work, focused on improving paediatric palliative care by exploring gaps in knowledge and identifying avoidable and/or modifiable factors in health care and family life to mitigate suffering of all involved’. True Colours continues to support the furthering of research into children’s palliative care and we look forward to seeing the success of the inaugural Chair replicated in other institutions in the UK and globally.

We wish Professor Kreicbergs every success in her new role.