Background In 2012, St Joseph’s Hospice and Marie Curie proactively formed a strategic partnership. Unified by the shared goal of enabling more people to achieve choice at the end of life, the partnership provides the required leadership, to facilitate change and develop across EoLC services.

Aim The partnership aims to:

• improve performance across the East London EoLC system;

• develop a stronger EoLC voice locally through reforms across health and social care.

• Meet the complex and growing demand for services through collaboration, innovation, and community engagement.

Approaches used The partnership identified a number of themes that collaborative leadership could benefit from: Urgent Care; Care in the last days of life; Support for Families and Carers; Coordination of Care.

The partnership has been driving change and stimulating innovative solutions through:

• Bringing together stakeholders from across health and social care, commissioning teams and service users to develop a shared commitment for change.

• Designing new services to better meet local need with multi-borough, multi-disciplinary teams.

• Developing robust business cases to support and inform commissioning.

Outcomes Outcomes of the partnership :

• Raising the profile of EoLC across East London, and placing the hospice at the centre of developments.

• Design of an ambitious EoLC Coordination Centre.

• Undertaking detailed baseline mapping of the support available for families and carers.

• Hosting stakeholder and community events to raise an understanding of needs of families and carers, laying the foundations for change and development.

Application to Hospice practice The value of partnership work to support hospice development :

• The importance of hospices taking a pro-active leadership role in forming networks across East London.

• The value of sharing resources, expertise, learning, and networks to make improvements and facilitate the redesign of care.

• The recognition of the contribution that palliative and end of life care can make to the wider health economy.