As a large multi-disciplinary community palliative care team, together we have experienced a whole range of unexpected and unprecedented demands as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. In March 2021 to mark a point in time when the nation came to stand still, in ‘locking down’, and when our world changed irrevocably, the St Christopher’s Community Palliative Care Team held an extraordinary multi-disciplinary team meeting to reflect on the previous year.

We gave space and time to discuss the care and support we have provided to specific individuals who have had a personal impact on us as human beings and professionals working in extremely challenging circumstances. Each discipline from within the multi-disciplinary team was invited to present at least one case, and discuss this person’s story, and their own story within this, to consider the impact this person and their care had for them, and their learning from this. Within this meeting we heard contributions from nurses, doctors, arts therapists, social workers, the hospice chaplain, a cognitive behavioural therapist, and the rehabilitative allied health professionals.

In this presentation, by layering the St Christopher’s Lantern Model of Palliative and End of Life Care Nursing onto each story, we present a number of the case studies we discussed, which highlight the unique contribution of palliative care professionals at a unique point in the history of a global pandemic. The Lantern Model (Mitchell, 2021; Overview of the Lantern Model – see: https://cdn.ps.emap.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2021/03/Overview_of_the_Lantern_Model.pdf) supports practitioners to be curious in relation to the key tenets that shape and guide the care being provided, the context of care, the personal prerequisites required to provide care, the organisational conditions required to support care, the processes of nursing care, and the possible outcomes of care. Therefore, we will draw on the components of the Lantern Model to highlight and celebrate the work of a specialist palliative care team at a unique time in history.