Dorothy House Hospice Care covers 800 square miles of Somerset, Wiltshire and Bath and North East Somerset. Embedded throughout our communities are patients and families navigating individual and complex paths towards the end of life. With such a variety of localities and coalescing models of primary care all with differing needs, our focus this year has been on embedding our new localised community teams, bringing Palliative & End of Life Care (PEOLC) Services closer to those who need it.
With rising running costs and an insecure financial landscape – one in five UK hospices cutting services, as state funding has not matched growing demand – we know that we alone cannot reach everyone who needs PEOLC, but neither should we be so arrogant to assume that this is what our community wants.
Our Dorothy House strategic vision is to live in a society where death is a part of life. We made great progress throughout 2023-2024; caring for 5% more patients and 15% more families and carers, because of the willingness, instilled in 1976 by our founder Prue Dufour, to listen to the needs of the communities we serve and adapt or create new ways to meet these needs.
Having co-created, then signed up to the planning ahead charter, What Matters To You, alongside our ICS (B&NES, Swindon and Wiltshire Integrated Care Board - BSW ICB), BSW Hospices Together and through using a strength-based approach, we have listened to and engaged our local community to co-develop, co-produce and partner with acute and community organisations to deliver innovative care and support directly to patients, carers and families where they need it most.
As Covid upended the clinical status quo, we actively stepped up our system partnership working. Collaboration with the Royal United Hospital has been key and we have professionals working in tandem delivering clinics, visiting the wards, enabling a safe and early discharge. This, in turn, enables a shift of services out of hospital and into the community by providing an outpatient blood transfusion service at the Hospice.
But end of life care isn't just the remit of hospitals and hospices; ensuring dignity in death and support for families is reliant on the wider community working in partnership. Dorothy House's Research and Education Team has been delivering commissioned training to care home staff via our Tulip Standard which covers the essentials of end of life clinical care through to complementary therapies.
Dorothy House also collaborates with Carer Support Wiltshire to run several Bereavement Help Points. These local, often volunteer led, drop-in groups welcome allow who has suffered a bereavement to meet and talk with others experiencing similar thoughts and feelings. By training existing volunteers, our community is better equipped to support more people across our region with the quality bereavement support that everyone deserves.
Monitoring the outcomes of all of this and integral to the continuous improvement of PEOLC services in our area is our provider-led, ICS wide PEOLC Alliance. Together with our ICS colleagues we've completed a gap analysis and are using this data to develop a joint work plan to ensure that our services are more integrated to better meet patients' and their loved ones' needs efficiently, effectively and with compassion.
Wayne de Leeuw is chief executive of Dorothy House Hospice Care, a Hospice UK Advisory Council member and Trustee at We Hear You.
