Sarah Combes

Sarah Combes is a Research Fellow in Palliative Care and Ageing at the University of Surrey and a specialist palliative care nurse at St Christopher’s Hospice. Her work focuses on advancing clinically applied research for older adults with advancing frailty and multiple morbidities, emphasizing decision-making, workforce development, and service improvement. She holds a PhD from King’s College London, where her research developed a behavior change intervention for advance care planning (ACP) with frail elders. Currently, she leads the PALLUP study to improve home-based palliative care for frail older people and contributes to the ALLIANCE partnership to enhance integrated care delivery for this population.

Her academic roles include affiliations with the Long-term Conditions and Ageing Expert Group, School of Health Sciences, and the Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences. Key contributions include co-producing resources for advance care planning with older adults and informal carers, and developing frameworks to address palliative care inequities for those with multimorbidity. She has been awarded prestigious fellowships from HEE/NIHR and KSS ARC for her innovative work.

Research interests span frailty assessment, palliative care service design, healthcare professional training, and patient-centered decision-making. Notable projects include the ‘Conversations on Living and Dying’ intervention to facilitate ACP engagement and the Connections Project to improve quality of life and service coordination for frail populations.

Her awards reflect recognition of her translational research impact, including the HEE/NIHR Clinical Doctoral Research Fellowship and KSS ARC Individual Development Award. Professional activities include peer review analysis for qualitative manuscripts and interdisciplinary collaboration across healthcare sectors.