Co-Production: Improving Primary Care support for Patients at the End of Life

Why we are doing this?

We got a letter of complaint from a son to a GP practice in the Wirral. The letter was about how his Mum was cared for during her final hours and how this has instigated the development of a protocol in his Mum's name.

During the final hours of her life, she was in pain, and medication was delayed due to a sequence of events. The GP practice worked with the care home and communication pharmacy as well as the family to draft the Margaret (Joan) storey protocol which aims to set agreed principles about how we should work. Through this work, we hope to use this experience to make improvements.

How we will do it?

 This project will:

·         Engage carers and family members to understand their experience through focus groups. We will hold 4 focus groups or secondary care, community care, hospice, and care homes, each report will be written up and shared with system partners.

·         Coproduce a protocol that can be widely adopted at the system level led by people with lived experience

·         Provide training and education on the protocol including Margaret’s story as told by her son Paul

·         The project will also create a coproduced training module which we will look to then convert into an online e-learning module to be shared across Cheshire and Merseyside.

Outcomes

·         People with lived experience will have a mechanism to provide feedback.

·         The protocol was developed to encourage a more joined-up approach between social care, primary care, and community pharmacy.

·         Increase in standardised practice.

·         Specific training module to share across the system.

·         Increased staff knowledge across health and social care.

·         A more cohesive approach to community palliative care co-produced by people with lived experience.

·         Improve patient experience.

 Who (Potential Partners)

·         One Wirral

·         Health Watch

·         St Johns Hospice

·         Maggie’s

·         Wirral University Hospital Palliative Care team