CCG launch End of Life Strategy to support patients and their families
NHS Vale of York Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) and local organisations have developed a new strategy to ensure that patients receive tailored and coordinated care when approaching the end of life.
The 2019-2024 End of Life Care strategy details the collective ambitions for palliative and end of life care in the Vale of York which have been guided by feedback from local communities and NHS England recommendations.
Maximising the comfort and wellbeing of a patient approaching the end of life, taking account of their preferred place of death and ensuring each person gets fair access to care are all detailed within the strategy and explain how health and social care staff and communities will put these into practice.
Michelle Carrington, the CCG’s Executive Director of Quality and Nursing said: “Our vision is for everyone requiring end of life care to have access to high quality, responsive services that meet their needs, at the time and place where they are needed. Working together with health and care providers across the Vale of York will ensure coordinated delivery of care tailored to support each patient and their family.
“In developing the End of Life Care strategy we gained an understanding of what matters to our patients, our local communities, our staff and our partners through a range of engagement and involvement opportunities.”
Fourteen healthcare partners including York Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, Macmillan, Marie Curie and St Leonards Hospice have come together to support the strategy.
Emma Johnson, Chief Executive Office, St Leonards Hospice said: “St Leonard's Hospice was delighted to have been asked to be a part of this work and we are very much looking forward to working with commissioners and providers of health and social care services to improve quality, co-ordination and access to care in the future.
This vision for end of life care is the result of many months of collaboration between partners. It has, for the first time, also involved patients and those closest to them, ensuring that the ambitions we have described and are committed to delivering are aligned to the needs of people who will use the services.
The scale of increased demand on services in the future is huge. People are living longer and developing more complex needs and this will only increase over the next 10-15 years. We will only be able to meet the needs of our patients and their families by working collaboratively and this strategy provides a framework that we can all work within to improve care at the end of life.
The CCG has also created a Citizen’s Charter, which sets out the commitment to the End of Life Strategy in a brief, easy to read document more accessible to the public, which can be accessed here.
The Vale of York End of Life Care strategy 2019-2024 can be viewed in full on the CCG’s website: https://www.valeofyorkccg.nhs.uk/our-work/eolc/
