Ms Karen Charnley:

The institute was developed when Professor David Clark was invited to visit Ireland around 2009 and 2010 to undertake a study into the future development of the palliative care sector. From his work it was proposed that an institute was needed to bring together organisations interested in palliative care across the island. Our partners, including the hospice education providers and universities, undertook work to develop the model for the all-island institute.

We were fortunate to receive a substantial grant from Atlantic Philanthropies. We also receive funding from the Irish Cancer Society, the Irish Hospice Foundation, the Public Health Agency and the Health Research Board, among others. While we receive funding for specific projects, our main funding came from Atlantic Philanthropies.

We have partners from both the North and South of Ireland. We work with six hospices, Marie Curie Cancer Care and Northern Ireland Hospice in Northern Ireland, and in the Republic, St. Francis Hospice, Our Lady's Hospice, Milford Care Centre and Marymount University Hospital and Hospice. We work across three main themes, namely, education, policy and practice, and research. We always work across both jurisdictions and seek to collaborate with organisations. For example, on the children's and young people's Palliative Hub site, we sought to link in with the active organisations involved and professionals working in the different health systems, such as consultants, nurses and different leads.

The children and young people's Palliative Hub is a good example of our North-South work. Our head of research works part time for us and also works within University of Ulster. We have leads for the different research areas from University of Ulster, Queen's University, UCD, Trinity College, Maynooth University, NUIG, the University of Limerick and UCC.

We are very much linking with the different centres in universities and the researchers in them to take forward the palliative care research agenda. That is one example of how we are collaborating on a North-South basis.

Deputy Kitt asked about funding. As one member rightly said, we are not a front-line service provider but we very much link in with the palliative care sector and those who provide a palliative care approach in hospitals and front-line services and those providing specialist palliative care in hospices, homes and day care centres in hospices. We aim to support them by giving them resources such as online learning and new research that will impact on their practice. I outlined our funding models and we support palliative care providers to source additional funding for their services.

Senator Moran referred to rural areas. We have recently undertaken a project to identify community learning needs with the Carers Association and Carers Trust Northern Ireland. The project undertook focus groups and has a working group of carers who have experienced palliative care services. The project aims to give us a clear steer on how we can meet the community learning needs relating to palliative care both in terms of online resources, for example, videos and paper resources. We are conscious that everything cannot be delivered online. The project will give us recommendations, which we will then go forward with to look at ways in which we can engage with, for example, rural communities. We are also conscious of the barriers in terms of online learning and the provision of online resources and, therefore, it may be that with the children's site, we will produce a paper edition with relevant information that can be handed to people if they do not have access to the website.

We aim to support our hospice partners in supporting rural communities. One example is Foyle Hospice. We have education fellowships which will enable professionals to go on a site visit to learn about best practice. One of the members of the team in Foyle Hospice visited a Compassionate Communities project, which operates out of Severn Hospice in Bristol. That project looks at getting the community to support people with palliative care needs. A similar project operates out of Milford Care Centre. We supported the professional to do the site visit and the Foyle Hospice is looking at rolling that out as a pilot project in its area. We are very much trying to facilitate and develop capacity within the sector.

Deputy O'Sullivan asked about staff numbers. We are a small team of approximately eight members. We are small in number but, hopefully, powerful. We have good links with all the hospices across the island. Six of the hospices are our partners but we also engage with other hospices that are not direct partners. For example, we have a senior nurse network, of which nurses from those hospices and hospitals are members and there are representatives from the majority of hospices on the island on the education network and they guide our work in terms of education. We are conscious of online education. We want to make the learning platform as easy as possible for people to log on to and access materials. If people have difficulties, we have telephone numbers and e-mail addresses through which they can contact us to provide them with support