This Network offers the all-Island palliative care research community opportunities to create a collaborative environment that supports the development of excellent and innovative research projects that will advance understanding of AIIHPC?s research strategy. The Social Justice Strand (SJS) is based on the premise that inequality exists in relation to palliative and hospice care access and service delivery across the island of Ireland for certain groups of people, sometimes referred to as vulnerable or marginalised (Steinstra & Chochinov 2012). Therefore, the overall aims and objectives of SJS are to: 1)Examine the experience of inequality towards and through hospice and palliative care service delivery across the island of Ireland as reported by individuals, their families and the health and social care workers who support them; 2)Explore personal characteristics, process and context that impact on experiences of hospice and palliative care where evidence suggests disadvantage in terms of access, service provision and outcome; 3)Describe factors and processes that are either beneficial or detrimental to achieving good hospice and palliative care outcomes; 4)Understand how social systems (economic, cultural, political and affective) impact on decision-making of people who experience inequality in relation to hospice and palliative care services across the island of Ireland; 5)Utilise such evidence to develop best practice approaches which strengthen relationships and facilitate greater awareness of the hospice and palliative care needs of people currently excluded by virtue of misunderstanding, diminished recognition and/or prejudice. Running in tandem with SJS will be the Measurement and Evaluation Strand (MES), the latter focusing specifically on measurement and evaluation. The overall aims and objectives of MES are to: 1.Explore methodological development for palliative care research with a focus on measurement of needs; measurement of impact and evaluation of service priority and delivery; 2.Develop better understanding on how best to elicit preferences and views for service users and families; 3.Enhance the design of studies of complex interventions using measures that embrace this complexity; 4.Support the development of measurement tools for palliative care research; 5.Utilise evidence to examine how best to disseminate complex findings in palliative care research. How the SRN Strands fit together and reflect strategic objectives of AIIHPC AIIHPC aim to establish a single Structured Research Network with initially two research strands. There is a strategic and logistic rationale for establishing a single Network: Strategically one Network will – ?Enable core arrangements to support the delivery of outstanding, innovative research across the network for building capacity, quality and sustainability, as well as translating research output to have real, practical impact on policy and practice. ?Provide a better opportunity to create a collaborative environment that supports the development of excellent and innovative research projects that will advance understanding of the Institute’s research themes and show strong potential for successfully applying for other funding; ?Strengthen the complementary links between individual research strands and facilitate the development of new work projects and/ or research strands in the future. ?Facilitate the closer alignment to AIIHPC?s values in addressing the issues of social justice and inclusivity. Logistically one Network will – ?Strengthen the links between SJS and MES via an overarching Network Management Committee; ?Avoid the duplication of efforts by individual research strands in relation to the provision of training and capacity-building for Network members; ?Streamline knowledge exchange and engagement activities across the research strands; ?Maximise the resources available to each research strands in terms of skills, knowledge, areas of expertise, etc; ?Provide a supportive environment to drive the strands in terms of progress and meeting timelines; ?Facilitate the coordination of budgets for the overall Network and individual strands. Each Research Strand will: ?Involve several academic organisations located across both jurisdictions working collaboratively to develop and produce innovative, high quality research in palliative and end-of-life care; ?Consist of individuals and groups from a wide range of different research disciplines and clinical professions working across multiple settings; ?Provide opportunities to develop methodological and interdisciplinary approaches to tackle challenges in this area; ?Ensure that the research will have the maximum positive impact on policy and practice by involving service users, and other policy and practice stakeholders, in all their research; ?Nurture and develop high quality researchers by incorporating a strong, well-managed research training/ career development programme.