About
About the Research Hub
The ICPCN Research Hub is a central place to find children's palliative care research, the people doing it, and practical guidance for doing it well, across all six WHO regions.
What's on it
Five kinds of record share one controlled vocabulary, so they connect to each other: researchers, research groups, current studies, published literature (curated by ICPCN in Zotero), and resources — ICPCN's guidance, the best material published elsewhere, and recorded expert talks. Alongside those is a community calendar. Because everything shares the same tags, one search box covers all of it, and any tag becomes a cross-cutting view. See Search.
Almost all of it is open without an account. You need one only to be listed in the directory yourself, to add a study, to suggest an event, or to message another researcher. Signing in needs an email address and no password.
The hub was designed with children's palliative care researchers rather than for them, and it is meant to keep changing that way. Tell us what's missing — it is read by the ICPCN team and it is how the next round of work gets decided.
Who runs it
The hub is run by the International Children's Palliative Care Network (ICPCN), a charity working to improve palliative care for children worldwide. It is deliberately kept simple enough for a small non-technical team to run without a developer on call.
Who built it
The hub was designed and built by Unity Innovations, a software company working for charities. They funded the build as a donation of time and expertise, and continue to fund the platform's hosting.
How review works
Anyone can create an account, but nothing reaches the public site unreviewed:
- Researcher profiles are checked by ICPCN before they appear in the directory. Editing a profile sends it back for a re-check.
- Group membership: asking to be listed as a member of a research group goes to ICPCN for approval, so a group's member list stays accurate.
- Guides and toolkits published from the workspace wait for ICPCN approval before they appear in the library or on the home page.
Your data and visibility
You choose whether your profile is public, visible only to signed-in researchers, or hidden entirely. Your email address is never displayed. When someone contacts you through the hub, the message is relayed by email and you decide whether to reply. You can export everything the hub holds about you, or delete your account permanently, from your profile. The full detail is in the privacy notice.
Getting help, or reporting something
If something looks wrong (a profile that isn't genuine, a page with content that concerns you, or a group listed incorrectly), please tell ICPCN so it can be looked at. The same route works for questions about your account, the review process, or anything covered by the terms and community code.
Contact ICPCN through icpcn.org. If you have an account on the hub, replying to any email the hub has sent you also reaches the team.
New here?
If you're early in your research career or not sure where to begin, there's a step-by-step route through the hub: Start here.