What is Palliative Care?
Palliative care is defined by NICE as follows:
Palliative care is the active holistic care of patients with advanced progressive illness. Management of pain and other symptoms and provision of psychological, social and spiritual support is paramount. The goal of palliative care is achievement of the best quality of life for patients and their families. Many aspects of palliative care are also applicable earlier in the course of the illness in conjunction with other treatments.
Palliative care aims to:
- Affirm life and regard dying as a normal process
- Provide relief from pain and other distressing symptoms
- Integrate the psychological and spiritual aspects of patient care
- Offer a support system to help patients live as actively as possible until death
- Offer a support system to help the family cope during the patient’s illness and in their own bereavement
The End of Life Programme
The End of Life (EoL) Programme aims to develop and improve palliative and end of life care services for all patients (regardless of diagnosis), enabling them to be cared for in their place of choice. Services will be supplied by trained and competent providers (specialist and generalist) who work collaboratively with other End of Life Care providers to deliver the best possible services for patients, families and carers.
Caring With Confidence – A free 5 session course aimed at Family Carers to improve their own situation and that of the person they care for. For more information please click here.
VOED Training – for more information please click here.
Specific intentions include:
- the delivery of timely, coordinated and consistent palliative and end of life care, including signposting to bereavement services
- development of the means of identifying patients who have palliative and end of life care needs, supported by a relevant prognostic tool, in a timely manner particularly in hospitals and care homes. This will include providing multi-professional education and training, the use of End of Life tools and the use of the yellow folders.
- DNACPR information will be communicated when patients are discharged, where applicable
- development of a robust and dynamic system that enables information sharing across all agencies involved. There will be continued piloting and extension of the use of the Electronic Palliative Care Coordinating System / EoL register.
- exploring the extension of Advanced Care Planning to patients resident in their own homes, to include educational content as raised by the current practitioner.
- Education
- End of Life Documents (Yellow Folders)
Information Leaflets & Fact Sheets
Useful Links
Local Links
- Strategic Clinical Network
- Be Ready For It
- St Nicholas Hospice
- Suffolk Cruse – Bereavement Care
- Suffolk Family Carers
- West Suffolk Hospital – Palliative Care Team
National links
- Gold Standards Framework
- Help the Hospices
- Improving End of Life Care
- Marie Curie Cancer Care
- National Council for Palliative Care – East England
- National End of Life Care Programme for Adults
- NICE – End of life care for adults quality standard
- Palliative Care for People with Learning Disabilities
