"Partnerships are everything; partners come in with different views and improve services."

-    Dr Helen Kariuki, University of Nairobi, Kenya

Despite the need for methodologically robust palliative care research in Africa to inform the teaching and delivery of effective and appropriate care, the architectural infrastructure needed to enable the development of that evidence base is largely absent.

To address this weakness, and generously funded by the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund, last week the African Palliative Care Association held the inaugural meeting of the African Palliative Care Research Network (APCRN) in Kampala, Uganda.  With participants from across the continent, Europe and North America, one of the central aims of the meeting was to bring together and secure buy-in to the APCRN from established African palliative care and health researchers.  However, other aims included to:

1. Agree on the modus operandi of the network, including the principles that underpin it, what membership entails and the rules for co-branding on research related to the network;
2. Develop a draft three-year strategic plan for the network;
3. Think-tank development of a prioritized research agenda;
4. Agree on a small number of quick wins for the network to provide credibility to the collaborative;
5. Agree on potential sourcing of funding for these quick wins, with a practical way forward for securing the necessary resources;
6. Discuss the development of potentially more substantial research projects, and;
7. Secure media coverage to support the APCRN.

To move the work forward, the network formed a Steering Committee based around four sub-regional African academic hubs (i.e. Uganda in the east; Nigeria in the west; South Africa in the south; and Egypt in the north), and hubs in Europe (assisted further by the European Association of Palliative Care's Task Force on Palliative Care in Africa: Fostering collaboration and partnership) and North America.

Additionally, in the course of the meeting's deliberations, it was highly refreshing to learn that there is a body of existing and ongoing research that has, and is, being developed, some of which (like the development of the APCA African Children's Palliative Outcome Scale) is ground-breaking.  Importantly, the meeting also resulted in a consensus that:

• There is a need for palliative care research on the continent (which indeed may be even more important in resource-poor settings where policy makers and other stakeholders have to direct finite resources optimally);
• Collaborative partnerships, such as those to be formed under the umbrella of the APCRN, make such research feasible;
• The network pursues not only the prioritized research agenda it developed, which was based upon previous deliberations at the APCA 2010 conference in Namibia, but also develops a training function in the future to ensure the build-up of research capacity on the continent to a critical mass, and lastly;
• It must disseminate its research findings widely, including amongst policy makers via the development of policy briefs that are founded within empirical findings.

As one of the European participants, Professor Lukas Radbruch, of the Department of Palliative Medicine at the University Hospital of Bonn, remarked after the meeting: "There is so much to be gained with partnerships … Partnerships have helped me to look at different cultures and thus be aware of underlying assumptions in my work to formulate good research questions."

It is anticipated that the APCRN will not only facilitate the generation of important research questions, addressing comparatively the pressing and diversified needs of people across the continent, but will also be the launch pad to accelerate the development of palliative care research in Africa.