Need to know
For #TeamEEAST Last updated: 18 April 2024 at 19:17
End of life care can be a difficult and emotive topic.
As clinicians it’s our natural instinct to always try to prolong and save life, but the situation gets much more complicated when we’re attending someone who is expected to die; striking a balance between following policies / procedures and doing what is ethically right, and most comfortable, for your patient is really difficult.
We’re frequently called when there is a sudden deterioration or crisis in a dying person’s condition, and we’re often the first or only health professionals present at or soon after a death. So, as a Trust, it’s one of our clinical priorities this year to improve care and experience for people and their families/carers at the end of their life along with looking to offer you more support.
To support this, we want to identify when we are receiving calls from and/or attending to patient who is at the end of their life, be it on an end of life pathway, receiving palliative care, or someone that you have identified as being at the end of their life and needing some support.
What are we asking you to do?
We’re asking EOC and patient-facing colleagues to put the keyword:
eolc
into the CAD or on your MDT via the notes for any end of life patient you come into contact with. This ‘eolc’ keyword works in the same way as the ‘111review’ keyword, and allows us to look at data easily, identify gaps in services, and see what things are or aren’t working well.
With the ‘eolc’ keyword, please also include a brief explanation of the situation you dealt with; was another service contacted about the patient? What treatment, if any, did you provide on scene? What was the outcome for the patient? Please also include any issues you had (such as problems with contacting external agencies for support), as well as any positive points. This only needs to be a couple of sentences, but will help make the data more useful.
What will the data be used for?
The idea behind the project is to gather information about the amount of end of life care we provide; in turn, that’s going to help shape the future of our practice, and develop our education and training in end of life care – including identifying areas in which we might need some extra support, or additional links to other services.
This work will help us to better support patients and their families/carers to enable them to die with dignity and in line with their wishes wherever possible, but also to improve the training we give to you around end of life care.
The Trust is developing a comprehensive clinical strategy around end of life care. Want to know more or get involved? Get in touch with Area Clinical Lead Sarah Stead at sarah.stead@eastamb.nhs.uk.
Published 24th November, 2016