Introduction The hospice movement often uses the term ‘holistic care’ to describe what it provides, with it being applied differently depending on the care setting. Personalisation could be considered another version of holistic care. Based on this we took the opportunity of bringing both holistic care and personalisation together, to explore what this means in practice for end of life care.

Progress for Providers is a recognised series of self-assessments, to enable providers to see how they are doing in delivering personalisation. There’s not something of this nature already available to hospice managers. Personalisation has primarily been a term used by social care, with government plans to integrate health and social care by 2018, its key we start to embed personalisation to hospice care now.

Aims The aim is to enable hospice managers, and anyone involved in supporting people at end of life, to know what personalisation looks like in practice and to introduce person-centred thinking tools that can add to the way that hospices can deliver truly personalised services.

Approach used The authors met to produce the self-assessment tool using their knowledge, key reports and other sources of information to inform the statements of each area of assessment. The tool will be sent out for comment, refined and tested during the summer of 2013, to be launched in October.

Outcomes and applications to hospice practice The use of Progress for Providers: End of Life offers an opportunity to critically examine local practice with a view to taking personalisation further.

While the future of hospices has been considered by the Commission, making progress in personalisation is another way to look at service provision to ensure it meets the needs of the people we support.