Hospice at Home
What is it?
Hospice at Home (H@H) is a team of specialised hospice nurses who visit terminally-ill patients in their homes to give care additional to that provided by District nurses. During the day, 8am until 8pm, the H@H nurses make house calls, sometimes with District nurses. Visits generally last up to one hour. During the night our hospice-trained healthcare assistants will stay in the patient's home from 10pm until 7am, to provide bedside care and enable family carers to catch up on sleep. The overnight service is being run as a 6-month pilot (22.06.09 - 22.12.09) funded by the Furness GP locality commissioning group.
Who is it for?
Any adult (18 yrs+) who is suffering from advanced serious illness (not just cancer) and who has complex care needs or rapidly-changing symptoms, or whose family carers need respite to be able to continue providing care at home.
What does it cost?
There is no cost to patients or their families - the service is mainly funded by charitable donations from local people with some contribution from the NHS.
How can we access the service?
Patients will usually be referred by their District nurse of a specialist, eg Macmillan, nurse. GPs and hospital doctors will also refer patients to the service. Patients or their families may make a direct enquiry to the hospice, but we will usually ask a District or specialist nurse to assess whether or not the service is appropriate.
How much care can we have?
This depends on the demand for our service. We will review every case regularly and prioritize requests on the basis of need. We will try to be fair in allocating our resources but, particularly with regard to the overnight service, we do not know yet what the demand will be.
Hospice@Home referral process
If you are a Health Care professional and you would like to make a referral, please click here.
For routine enquiries email yourhospice@stmaryshospice.org.uk or call 01229 580305 and leave a message on our answer phone. In an emergency please contact your GP or District nurse.