This special series on “Value of Palliative Care” is edited by Drs. Claudia Fischer, Gudrun Maria Waaler Bjørnelv, Rui Dang, Peter May, and Preeti Pushpalata Zanwar.

Claudia Fischer, MMSc, PhD
Department of Health Economics, Center for Public Health, Medical University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria

Dr. Fischer is a researcher and tutor working at the Department of Health Economics, Center for Public Health at the Medical University of Vienna. She is a member at the international Health Economic Association and Economics of Palliative & End-of-Life Care Special Interest Group, the Austrian Palliative Association and the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research Austria Regional Chapter. She is particularly interested in methods of quality-of-care research and outcomes research in the palliative and end-of-life care settings.

Gudrun Waaler Bjørnelv, PhD
Department of Public Health and Nursing, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway

Gudrun Waaler Bjørnelv (PhD) is Associate Professor in Health Economics at the Department of Public Health and Nursing at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Her research activities includes using national registers to evaluate different aspects of people’s health and the health care’s organization in the project Regforsk (www.ntnu.no/ism/forskning/regforsk). She also has a major interest in and experience with economic evaluation, including methods development and applicability of economic evaluation in different settings.

Bjørnelv also holds a part time position as Postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Health Management and Health Economics at the University of Oslo, where she is principal investigator in the SAFE-study (Securing high-quality Care For Cancer patients at End-of-life). In the SAFE-study, the aim is to evaluate the care that individuals receive at their end-of-life, to evaluate what patients, informal caregivers, and formal caregivers perceive as high quality care, and to gain insight on how to measure quality of life of individuals at their end of life and of their informal care givers.

Rui Dang, PhD
Health Economics Department, Westminster International University in Tashkent, Tashkent, Uzbekistan

Dr. Rui Dang, Senior Lecturer in Health Economics, Westminster International University in Tashkent, Tashkent, Uzbekistan.

Dr. Rui Dang is currently a senior lecturer in health economics at Westminster International University in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, and a guest professor in demographic economics at Gdansk University of Technology, Poland. His research interests focus on the intersection of the economics of healthcare, public health, healthcare policy evaluation, and demography. He serves as a scientific advisory committee member at the European Health Management Association (EHMA), a member of the Global Health Education Committee, and the Global Health Competency Subcommittee at the Consortium of Universities for Global Health (CUGH), and a special interest group co-convener at the International Health Economics Association. He is an associate editor of the International Journal of Technology Assessment in Healthcare (Cambridge University Press) and an editorial board member of the Journal of Migration and Health (Elsevier). He is also a member of the European Commission's Knowledge4Policy Community and a knowledge mobilizer of the British Parliament's Knowledge Exchange Unit.

Peter May, PhD
Centre for Health Policy and Management, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

Peter May, PhD is Research Assistant Professor in Health Economics at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland. He is the principal investigator on three grants that address inter-related questions on future needs, outcomes and costs associated with palliative and end-of-life care (PEOLC) in Ireland. He leads the economic evaluation component of large PEOLC studies in the European Union, the United Kingdom and the United States. He co-founded and co-leads the PEOLC special interest group within the International Health Economics Association and is a member of the European Association of Palliative Care task force on big data. His research interests focus on improving the economic evidence base on PEOLC through better use of routine data, quasi-experimental methods and new evaluative frameworks. He has co-authored over 50 scientific papers, book chapters, and major national and international reports.

Preeti Pushpalata Zanwar, PhD, MPH, MS
College of Population Health, Thomas Jefferson University, Philadelphia, PA, USA

Preeti Pushpalata Zanwar is a health economist & health services researcher, a scholar in aging with epidemiology/virology lab experience. She is a faculty in Jefferson College of Population Health, at the Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, PA, USA. Her scientific journey over the past two decades (2004 to present) has involved experiences leading and supporting extramurally/intramurally funded projects at multiple U.S. research intensive medical and public health Universities. She has served as a grant reviewer for the Social and Behavioral Sciences Standing Committee for the U.S. National Institutes on Aging at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD, USA. Her research interests are in gerontology, Alzheimer’s Disease and Dementia disparities, short and long-term outcomes of COVID-19, and in modelling healthcare costs, counts and outcomes. She is a co-editor for the American Society of Health Economists Newsletter. Her research has been published in scholarly peer-reviewed journals such as the Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Public Policy & Aging Report, Disability and Health among others.

Series outline:

1. Preface
2. Cost-effectiveness of a specialist palliative home care nurse-patient consultation followed by an interprofessional telephone case conference among patients with non-oncological palliative care needs: results of the multicentre KOPAL cluster randomized controlled trial 
3. Which measures to use for outcome assessment in palliative and end of life care? 
4. Economic impact of informal care of cancer patients at the end of life
5. Can quasi-experiments strengthen the economic evidence base on palliative care? Results and methodological learnings from an evaluation of hospital consultation services in Ireland 
6. Improving patient selection for specialized palliative care 
7. Place of living during end-of-life according to cause of death: a comparative analysis from Finland and Norway 
8. Prevalence, characteristics, and unmet needs of palliative care patients at Internal Medicine departments pre and during the COVID-19 pandemic 
9. The value proposition for palliative care evolved as healthcare financing has shifted
10. Professional needs in the Palliative Care field (literature review)
11. The value of palliative care in primary care: an international perspective

Disclosure:
The series “Value of Palliative Care” was commissioned by the editorial office, Annals of Palliative Medicine without any sponsorship or funding. Claudia Fischer, Gudrun Waaler Bjørnelv, Rui Dang, Peter May, and Preeti Pushpalata Zanwar are serving as unpaid Guest Editors for the series.