We would like to say thank you to everyone who took part. Their thoughts and feedback will be used as evidence as we move forward to develop the future model of care
Key Highlights
- Service Awareness and Effective Triage - We need to ensure the service is cohesive and delivered in a connected way. Sufficient information on what is available within the system should be available for healthcare professionals, carers and service users to ensure timely and effective triage.
- Proactive Approach instead of reactive - It is important to have a discussion prior to a crisis to record patient’s choice i.e. finding out where the patient would like to spend their last days of life e.g. home, Hospital, hospice, Care home etc. and encouraging them to make decisions.
- Improve GPs awareness of end of life services and support from the hospices.
- Improve communication between primary care, secondary care, social care and district nurses in terms of seamless discharges whatever day of the week which make things happened quickly and enables people’s wishes to be carried out.
- Ease of access, awareness, peoples wishes to be at the centre – Patient’s choice is important and should be at the centre of care. Early communication between district nurses, patients and family members is required especially when patient’s choice and families’ wishes don’t match as this can creates conflict and negative experience in the end of life care.
- Include patient, family & Carer in the early stages of care planning and communication.
- Family and Carers – Support the carer who is on that journey – think about how do we navigate the carer’s needs, what support is available for them in the system and how we can raise awareness on what is available? – signposting is important.
- Staff Awareness - Support the staff in improving their understanding of Carer’s psychological impact of losing someone, through stories i.e. patient, family and carer stories.
- The group suggested a small scale pilot – a leaflet outlining first point of contact and available services – look at what services are available within the borough and create a single point of information leaflet outlining these for patients, family members and carers.