St Luke’s leads pioneering new project for end of life care at home.
St Luke’s Hospice in Sheffield is the only UK palliative care centre taking part in a pioneering international project aimed at providing greater levels of end-of-life care for patients in their own homes.
The EnComPaSS (Enhanced Community Palliative Support Services) project follows a pilot scheme in Canada, which demonstrated a new way of providing effective and cost efficient care for patients and their families in their own homes.
It is anticipated that EnComPaSS could reduce the need for hospital admissions in England by 40-52%.
By providing high quality palliative care in the community, it could help more people to die with dignity in a place of their choosing.
Harnessing the latest IT developments, EnComPaSS allows one Senior Nurse or doctor to monitor multiple patients in their own homes from a remote setting, providing direction to St Luke’s Community Nurses who are in the patient’s home, working with the patients and their families.
Using secure tablet computers and software instead of paper-based systems, nurses capture patient clinical data at the patient’s bedside, and can review the data via an online dashboard, thereby improving communication and the quality of shared information across the service.
“Using EnComPaSS, St Luke’s Community Nurses really become the eyes, hands and ears of the Senior Nurse,” said Dr Sam Kyeremateng, St Luke’s Medical Director.
“We believe that this new approach will improve the quality of care for some of Sheffield’s most vulnerable end of life patients, reduce admissions and unnecessary visits to hospital, and help more patients to stay at home.”
The development of EnComPaSS has been a partnership between St Luke’s, Western University in Canada, Sensory Technologies of Canada and the University of Sheffield, a partner in the National Institute for Health Research, Collaborations for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care, Yorkshire and Humber (www.clahrc-yh.nihr.ac.uk).
The partnership was awarded £250,000 from the NHS England Nursing Technology Fund to develop the technology and training required to fully integrate the scheme which has now gone live throughout Sheffield.
“The majority of our care is delivered out in the community and at any given time our community nurses have a case load of about 300 patients across the whole of the city,” said Judith Park, St Luke’s Deputy Chief Executive and Director of Patient Care.
“This system allows our community team to work closely with day-care services and bring together medical, nursing, healthcare professionals and support teams all working towards one goal, enabling people to die with dignity in familiar surroundings.”
For more details contact Melanie Fox, Clinical Communications Manager at St Luke's at
[email protected] or call 0114 235 7521.