Background The Trust’s Strategy for End of Life Care (EOLC) outlines a vision that ensures care at end of life is as comfortable, dignified and individualised as possible. The importance of staff engagement to achieve success and effective implementation of the Strategy was recognised and the following outlines how this was approached.

Method A stakeholder analysis was undertaken to identify target staff groups and invitations were sent through a variety of communication methods. Consultation events were held with staff at all levels (clinical and non-clinical) during March and April 2017, led by Service Improvement, across a variety of Trust sites. These took the form of short interactive sessions lasting 30 min: a short presentation explaining the project background, followed by the opportunity to comment on 3 specific areas – what works well/could be improved for patients; for staff; and what would help improve staff confidence in delivering EOLC.

Results 140 staff attended from a wide range of professions; 891 comments were received, collated, analysed and grouped to identify areas of commonality. Emerging themes included communication and information sharing, education and training, care planning, DNACPR, support and supervision for staff, and environment of care. From these themes, five key workstreams were developed (review of Trust guidance for care in last days of life, development of a staff EOLC intranet site, development of an EOLC planning toolkit, review compatibility of information platforms, education and training) and are currently being addressed by the EOLC working group.

Conclusion The comments collated from the consultation events provided a valuable source of rich qualitative data on the views of staff and have informed areas for development. The interest and engagement for this process confirmed the enthusiasm of staff, who valued the opportunity to shape future developments; many have since become involved in aspects of this work.