Dr Anne Marie Raftery is Lead Nurse for Palliative Care at The Christie NHS Foundation Trust and an Honorary Senior Lecturer at the University of Salford. She won the PCRS Best Poster Prize at the Palliative Care Conference in 2026 for her poster ‘Beyond the Clinical Gaze: What Support Staff Teach Us About End of Life Care’. Here, she shares insights about the work that informed her poster and some advice for people starting out in palliative care research.
Can you tell us about your current role and what your research focuses on?
I am Lead Nurse for Palliative Care at The Christie NHS Foundation Trust and an Honorary Senior Lecturer at the University of Salford. My research focuses on healthcare support staff—healthcare assistants, porters and domestics—and what their everyday work teaches us about end‑of‑life care. I am particularly interested in aspects of care that are rarely documented or measured yet play a central role in how patients and families experience care.
What inspired you to pursue research in palliative care?
My interest grew directly from clinical practice. I repeatedly noticed that moments of dignity, reassurance and calm were often created through small, relational acts rather than formal interventions. These experiences led me to question whose work is noticed, whose knowledge is valued, and what remains unseen when attention is focused mainly on clinical tasks and outcomes.
What’s one thing about your field or research area that you wish more people understood?
Much of end‑of‑life care happens beyond the clinical gaze. Support staff are often the first to sense distress, notice subtle changes or respond intuitively to what a patient or family needs in the moment. Through ordinary interactions—how a space is prepared, how someone is accompanied, how silence is held—they help preserve dignity and create calm. This work is relational and learned through experience, yet it is rarely captured despite its clear impact.
What keeps you motivated in what can be a very emotionally demanding area of research?
What sustains me is the privilege of listening carefully to people whose voices are not always heard. Participants were generous, thoughtful and reflective about their work, and I felt a strong responsibility to represent their experiences with care. Knowing that the research could help make everyday care more visible and valued also provided motivation.
Can you share a project or finding you’re particularly proud of?
One of the most meaningful findings from my recent ethnographic study was seeing how support staff quietly teach others how to care through everyday practice. Across settings, they model attentiveness, emotional presence and respect for personhood in ways that are rarely formalised. These practices form a hidden curriculum of care that powerfully shapes patient and family experience yet often remains invisible in research and organisational learning.
What challenges have you faced in your research so far — and how have you navigated them?
Ethnographic research in end‑of‑life settings brings challenges, including access, time pressures and the emotional weight of close observation. Building trust, working reflexively and having strong supervisory support were essential. Creating protected space for reflection also helped me to sustain the work.
How do you hope your work will make a difference in palliative care?
I hope it encourages more inclusive recognition of everyone involved in end‑of‑life care. Practically, this includes who is visible in quality reporting, who is included in debriefs, and whose perspectives shape organisational learning. More broadly, it invites us to listen differently to the everyday practices that quietly shape care.
What’s next for you and your research?
I’m interested in building on this work by exploring how these insights can inform team learning, service design and organisational culture, particularly in acute and cancer care settings.
What’s a piece of advice you would give to someone starting out in research?
Stay close to practice and remain curious. Some of the most important research questions emerge from paying attention to what feels ordinary and asking why it matters.
Tell us something people might be surprised to learn about you.
People are sometimes surprised to learn how much of my research thinking happens while walking or noticing everyday spaces—corridors, waiting areas, transitions between places. Those ordinary spaces often hold the richest clues about how care is experienced.