Prospect Hospice Education Team has designed a creative, innovative and unique training programme to support the development of unregistered staff in care homes and build on the partnerships currently in place in our surrounding area.

Ensuring that people who are dying are able to remain in their place of choice and avoiding inappropriate hospital admissions, care home workers need to have skills and training in high quality end of life care provision.

Improved collaborative working with care homes is high on the list of priorities for hospices. The focus is to empower their unregistered staff to provide high level quality care to people with life limiting illness similar to that which is provided in a hospice.

The Education Passport provides a gateway to effective learning, offering staff an opportunity to be fully supported in their development of end of life care skills. Generating both theory and practical elements encourages an improved understanding of the complexities often evident in good end of life care.

Priorities for care of the dying and the essence of quality end of life care are principles that drive the programme. Through the education passport, staff will build a toolbox of skills that are transferrable to any care setting.

Participants will be required to complete all five theory based training sessions and demonstrate their learning in practice through clinical observation. Taught sessions are delivered in the hospice and practice based learning is observed in the workplace.

Once all components are completed the passport will be stamped and signed off and will remain valid for two years. Participants will attend update training after two years to maintain validation of the passport. The emphasis is on providing a gateway for continued learning alongside shaping partnerships with care homes for the future.