Background The positive impact of rehabilitation on patients with life-limiting conditions includes reduced impact of symptoms on daily activities and increase in wellbeing (World Health Organization. Policy brief on integrating rehabilitation into palliative care services. WHO Regional Office for Europe; 2023). The role of the therapy team in IPU was expanded to provide palliative rehabilitation. This is an innovative piece of work as to our knowledge, it is not common for hospices to do so.

Aims Provide rehabilitative palliative care to all appropriate patients admitted to the IPU by providing the opportunity to identify what matters most and set goals.

Methods The therapy team formed a Multi-Disciplinary working group that used Hospice UK benchmarking guidance (Tiberini & Richardson. Rehabilitative palliative care: Enabling people to live fully until they die, a challenge for the 21st century. 2015) to track progress over 12 months. A twelve-month action plan was developed and implemented by the therapy team. The therapy team began screening all admissions to IPU and goal-setting offered to all patients excluding those admitted with Australian-modified Karnofsky Performance scale (AKPS) (Abernethy, Shelby-James, Fazekas, et al. BMC Palliat Care. 2005;4:7) of 10%, rapidly deteriorating, dying or unable to consent due to capacity. Education sessions provided for nurses and healthcare assistants. Data collected on whether appropriate patients were provided the opportunity to set a goal. Feedback received from patients and clinicians.

Results A Hospice UK rehabilitative palliative care benchmark for best practice baseline score of 29/111 (26%) increased to 64/111 (57%) after six months. Twelve-month review due June 2024.There was no evidence of patient opportunity to set goals prior to the project. Data collected demonstrates that 100% of appropriate patients were offered goal setting nine months later. In the twelve months since the project launched 95 patients were offered the opportunity to set a goal and 70 patients set a goal.

Conclusion The therapy team are well placed to facilitate goal setting with support of MDT. Patients want to set goals and value the opportunity to set them. This is the first step to embedding a goal focussed agenda to an MDT approach.