Article Text
Abstract
Background Two years ago, when the pandemic lockdown began, our county’s health, social and spiritual care teams realised there was no centralised hub for vital end of life care information and education. As a consequence information was stored on various organisational websites, but this proved to be an unsatisfactory solution, confusing to both staff and service users.
Aim A new ‘End of Life Care Education’ team was formed in partnership between our Clinical Commissioning Group and the NHS; the team’s goal was to bring parity of content and access to end of life care education and resources to both staff and the public countywide.
Process and outcomes We have developed a network across organisations, bringing together palliative care experts from the NHS, social services, the three hospices within our county and various care and faith organisations. Through this we have established and agreed our end of life care education strategy as a network, in alignment with both the Health Education England End of Life Care Education Framework (2017) and NICE Quality Standards 13 (2021) and 144 (2017).
We have centralised an online palliative care information hub (Somerset End of Life Care and Bereavement Support - https://somerset.eolcare.uk) and developed a new cross-organisational open access website platform for staff and public use. We have developed a learning management system and are promoting our website to the public via a library digital accessibility project with occupational therapy students.
We intend to evaluate our work to demonstrate improvement system wide, via a series of thematically analysed interviews with staff which explores their knowledge and skills in end of life care against the Health Education England End of Life Care Core Skills Education and Training Framework (2017).
Summary We hope our presentation will demonstrate both a record of our achievements so far and also provide inspiration, structure and suggestions to other organisations and counties wishing to standardise their resources and education.