Background The Community Hospice and St Christopher’s Hospice, which cover neighbouring areas of south east London, are on a mission to improve accessibility and challenge people’s misconceptions and fear. Our data showed that the people we support aren’t always reflective of the communities we serve and we knew change was needed.

Aims

• To better understand people’s views of hospices and barriers that may stop them accessing support.

• Create new brands that dispel these myths, raise awareness and encourage people to access services.

• Collaborate and share our findings and learnings with each other.

Methods

• Commissioned research using YouGov and creative agencies.

• Heard from over 3,000 people via focus groups, individual interviews and surveys.

• Focused on capturing views of people we knew weren’t accessing our services.

• Worked with creative agencies to develop new brands to ensure both hospices were accessible to everyone.

Results Highlights: We found that what was important to people at the end of life was very similar irrespective of people’s religions, backgrounds etc. People told us it was important to ‘see people like them’ on our channels including diversity of age, gender, ethnicity and sexuality. In one survey of over 600 people:

• Only 47% of people know hospice care can be provided at home.

• 42% of people feel ‘end of life care’ best describes what we do compared to 23% preferring ‘hospice care’.

• 26% of people are unsure/believe hospice care cannot be accessed by people of any income. Most people of ethnic minority expect hospice care would be means tested or paid for.

Conclusion Through listening to the public we created new brands that better reflected the needs of our communities. Through working together we were able to share and develop our ideas and hold each other to account to ensure the best possible outcome.