Background Care homes, where a fifth of the population die, are crucial providers of end-of-life care (EOLC), for the elderly with frailty and dementia, but many require further EOLC training. The Gold Standards Framework Care Homes (GSFCH) Training Programme provides a more proactive, person-centred, systematic approach adopted within care homes, enabling better care with fewer avoidable admissions and hospitals deaths, and more dying where they choose. The GSF Centre developed partnerships with several hospices as Regional Centres as part of the national cascade of the GSFCH Programme.

Aims To describe the development of GSF Regional Centre to cascade training to facilitate embedded sustainable proactive end-of-life care for residents in line with their wishes and preferences.

Methods Twelve regional centres were recruited through an application process and a process of staged train-the-trainers developed ensuring quality assurance of the GSF Care Homes Programme delivery to a wider local audience, usually involving four to six workshops over several months. Training included earlier identification, clinical assessment, advance care planning discussions and planning living and dying well. Intrinsic comparative evaluation data is collated to evaluate the impact. Many homes then progress to Accreditation with the recognised GSF Quality Hallmark Award and many more are re-accredited, demonstrating sustainability.

Results Results from the Regional Centres delivery of the GSF CH Programme will be presented including numbers trained, attainment of standards, and impact factors. The benefits of a collaborative approach are further discussed showing the benefit to hospices of this shared approach.

Conclusion Partnership working between GSF Centre, hospice regional centres and care homes facilitates spread of this successful programme, benefits to hospices with increased uptake of other training and benefits to care homes enabling more residents receiving better EOLC and more dying where they choose. Further areas of development will be discussed.