Palliative care at home is care that helps someone live as well as possible with a serious illness. End-of-life care is when someone is thought to be in their final months, weeks or days. Helping at Home supports both.
What this kind of care looks like in practice
Most end-of-life care is weeks or months of regular, calm visits. They help someone stay at home, stay comfortable, and keep their routine for as long as that’s possible.
Day to day, it can include:
- Medication prompts and administration of prescribed medicines (including controlled drugs where signed off and within scope).
- Help with movement, using a hoist if needed.
- Catheter and stoma care.
- Quiet company at difficult moments.
- Overnight care, sleeping or waking nights, depending on the care plan.
- Support for the family, alongside the care they give.
As the illness progresses, we adjust the care plan with whoever leads the clinical care.
Who we work alongside
We are one part of a team. The others are usually:
- The person’s GP, who oversees medical care and prescribing.
- Community nursing team or district nurses, who manage clinical interventions, syringe drivers, pressure care assessments and end-of-life symptom management.
- A specialist palliative care team or hospice (where one is involved). Locally that’s often Beaumond House in Newark, St Barnabas in Lincolnshire, or another hospice depending on referral pathway.
- A specialist nurse where the person has a specific condition (Macmillan, Marie Curie, a condition-specific specialist nurse).
- Family carers and friends, who often do most of the daily care alongside us.
- A hospital palliative care team if the person has been an inpatient.
Our role is to deliver the planned visits and report changes. Anything clinical that sits with the community nursing team stays with the community nursing team.
NHS Continuing Healthcare Fast Track
If your family member’s condition is rapidly deteriorating and may be entering its final phase, they may be eligible for NHS Continuing Healthcare Fast Track. It bypasses the longer CHC assessment process and triggers urgent NHS funding.
A clinician completes the Fast Track tool, usually a community nurse, hospital specialist or GP. It is designed to deliver a decision within a few days. When a Fast Track package comes to Helping at Home, we work with the commissioning team to get the rota in place quickly. The first visit is usually within 24 to 72 hours of commissioning, depending on the package size and the carers needed.
See our NHS Continuing Healthcare page for more on Fast Track.
Where home care alone is not enough
Sometimes more clinical input is needed than home care, family and community nursing can safely provide between them. At that point a hospice inpatient unit, a community hospital, or hospital admission may be the right next step.
If we believe a situation is reaching that point, we will tell you. The decision sits with the family and the clinical team.
Familiar carers in the last weeks and days
We aim to give each client a core team of up to four carers, and we plan end-of-life visits around that team wherever possible. If a regular carer is on leave, cover comes from another carer in our directly employed team who has been briefed on the care plan. We never use agency carers.
Bereavement and after-care
When someone we’ve been caring for dies, we can carry on visiting for an agreed handover period while the family deals with the practical things. Some families want a final visit to say goodbye to the carers who knew the person, while others prefer space. Either is right.
After long and intense care, our carers can also feel the loss. We have support in place for our team, which also helps them care well for the next family.
What to do next
Call 01636 646915 for a free conversation. If you’re already working with a community nursing team or hospice, we can talk to them directly with your consent.
If your family member is being assessed for Fast Track CHC, ask the clinician or discharge team to mention Helping at Home as a possible provider. We respond to commissioning enquiries the same day where we can.
We provide palliative care in Newark, Grantham, Bingham, Retford, Ollerton, Southwell, Collingham and North Hykeham, and the surrounding villages.
