Robin Cohen, PhD

Robin Cohen has a PhD in Psychology. She has helped develop palliative care research in Canada by leading the CIHR/NCIC Strategic Training Initiative in Palliative Care, the CIHR New Emerging Team in Family Caregiving in Palliative and End of Life Care, and the NCIC Sociobehavioural Cancer Research Network Palliative Care Team.

Her research focuses on many aspects of palliative care, all with a whole-person care perspective. The ultimate goal of her research is to optimize the quality of life of palliative care patients and that of their family caregivers. She began by developing measures of their quality of life (MQOL: McGill Quality of Life Questionnaire; QOLLTI-F: Quality of Life in Life-Threatening Illness – Family Caregiver version). With those outcome measures, she has conducted some descriptive studies and is now focused on developing and testing interventions.

Robin Cohen is well-known for developing the MQOL: McGill Quality of Life Questionnaire – the most widely used quality of life questionnaire in palliative care. More recently, she developed a measure of the quality of life of family caregivers of people with advanced life-limiting illness (QOLLTI-F: Quality of Life in Life-Threatening Illness – Family Caregiver version). She is also helping to develop measures of satisfaction with end-of-life care and the quality of death. Her research has highlighted the importance of existential well-being. Among other things, with her trainees, she is now developing and testing interventions to help people re-establish a sense of meaning and purpose in their lives, while taking into account a diagnosis of advanced cancer or the fact that they are recently bereaved.