Lothian Palliative Care Redesign Programme

Lothian Palliative Care Redesign Programme

Marie Curie Cancer Care is working in partnership with NHS Lothian and local partners to develop and deliver high quality palliative and end of life care and support, helping ensure people receive the care they want and need, in the place of their choice. The overall aim of the Redesign Programme is to assist in taking further the community-based model of end-of-life care currently in place across Lothian – maximising the time spent in people’s preferred place of care, minimising emergency admissions where these can be avoided, and supporting choice of place of death where this can be realistically achieved.

One of the four objectives of the Programme is “to raise public awareness of, and promote community involvement in death, dying and bereavement”. Key stakeholders from across NHS Lothian and Marie Curie took part in the workshop Health Promoting Palliative Care in Lothian – Options for Improvement in May 2013, at which delegates heard presentations relating to the theory and practice of health promoting palliative care. This included information about Good Life, Good Death, Good Grief and health promoting palliative care initiatives already underway in Lothian and elsewhere. Delegates then had the opportunity to contribute to the generation of a long list of options future potential health promoting palliative care initiatives for Lothian.

The list of ideas and solutions generated at the workshop has been collated, themed and grouped, and will be considered against the programme objectives and a number of “critical success factors” set by the Programme Board. It is envisaged that the Outline Business Case for the programme as whole – setting out the preferred options across all the workstreams, will be approved by January 2014 at which point detailed planning and phased implementation of the of the resulting projects will commence.