Improving end-of-life care in nursing homes: Implementation and evaluation of an intervention to sustain quality of care

Source: Palliative Medicine 2013 v.27(8) pp772-778

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Date of publication: September 2013

Publication type: Article

In a nutshell: Internationally, policy calls for care homes to provide reliably good end-of-life care. The authors undertook a 20-month projectto sustain palliative care improvements achieved by a previous intervention. The aim was to sustain a high standard of palliative care in seven UK nursing care homes using a lower level of support than employed during the original project and to evaluate the effectiveness of this intervention. A lower level of nursing support managed to sustain and build on the initial outcomes. However, despite increased adoption of key end-of-life care tools, hospital deaths were higher during the sustainability project. While good support from palliative care nurse specialists and GPs can help ensure that key processes remain in place, stable management and key champions are vital to ensure that a palliative care approach becomes embedded within the culture of the care home.

Length of publication: 7 pages