ONE year on from the transfer of end of life services to Basildon's St Luke's Hospice, a manager has reflected on a hugely positive partnership.

At the end of June 2017 the end of life care and community MacMillan services transferred from North East London Foundation Trust (NELFT) to St. Luke’s Hospice, and became known as ‘The Community Palliative Care Team’ (CPCT).

In that year, working for the hospice has made a huge difference for the team as it restructured and integrated with the hospice - directly improving results for patients.

The CPCT team offers specialist care, support and advice in their own homes, as well as supporting patients' physical needs with pain and symptom control as well as "care planning".

CPCT manager, Matt Goddard, said: "Prior to joining the hospice we all worked remotely on ‘hot desks’ at different venues, we are now all based in one office so there has been a great improvement in communication, team working and moral.

"The team has been re-structured and integrated within the hospice’s established ways of working, because of this we have been able to use our budget to increase the number of nursing staff, adding three clinical nurse specialist to the team enabling us to make more home visits and increase the number of patients.

"There has also been a marked difference in team skill sets, as the hospice has invested in supporting us with additional training. Clinical nurse specialists received training so they can prescribe medication – currently six nurses have this specialism – by the end of the year a further two more will.

"It’s important that we form a bond of trust between ourselves and patients, however, this may mean that team members can become emotionally involved, exposing themselves to stress and upset when patients don’t respond to care as positively as we had hoped.

"To support the Team St. Luke’s offers emotional support to staff."

Now that restructuring has largely been completed, the next year will focus on improved training, as well as rebranding so the team matches closely with St Luke's Hospice.

Mr Goddard added: "In the past year we have focused on settling in, restructuring and up-skilling. Going forward we want to continue to develop educationally, giving team members the skills and putting in place ways to formally share individual learning so that the whole team can benefit.

"Having re-structured we need to re-brand so that the team has a closer identity to the St. Luke’s Hospice brand.

"We are going to focus on introducing and establishing the same Key Indicators, as used by St. Luke’s clinical teams, to monitor and measure our performance – this will be important in ensuring that we continue to develop as a ‘St. Luke’s Hospice team’ and deliver ever improving, specialist quality care to patients."