As many readers of the PRO Newsletter know, our colleague and friend Catherine Pouget died on July 3, 2001, at the age of 31, after a long and courageous illness. During the last year of her life she suffered greatly, not only from the effects of the illness and its treatment, but even more from the lack of understanding and compassion in those who were responsible for her. In her memory, Mapi Rearch Institute has for several years offered an award to support the design and
implementation of projects  intended to improve the quality of life of those who are terminally ill.

From 2009, the emphasis of the award will be more specific and more relevant to its original intention: to improve the quality of the interactions between patients and those involved in their treatment, rather than their quality of life in general.

At the same time, the Award will no longer be limited to projects that are solely intended to contribute to the scientific literature. Authors of projects and innovative ways of increasing the quality and value of carer-patient interaction are encouraged to apply.The object of these changes is to enable those who may not have had formal scientific training to make effective use of their experience. Proposals, whether strictly scientific in intention and/or design or not, may focus upon

patients, their families, or medical and other carers. Their chief intention will be  improvement in the quality of CARE that patients receive towards the end of their lives.

All applications will be evaluated by senior staff members of the Mapi Research Institute and its Advisory Committee.

Criteria

The criteria for evaluating proposals are Appropriateness (i.e., its relevance to the stated purpose of the award); Imaginativeness (i.e., originality of the concept and the method of its execution and evaluation); Realism (i.e., the likelihood that the defined objective and its evaluation will be achieved within the intended period – maximally two years); Generalisability (i.e., usefulness to other people or institutions in the field).

The description of your proposal should clearly answer the following questions:

a. What specific problem do you intend to address?
b. What specific methods do you propose to employ to solve the problem?
c. How will you show your work has been successful, or explain why if it is not?