RCGP and Marie Curie partnership to spotlight more attention on end of life care

Marie Curie and The Royal College of General Practitioners have today announced that they will continue to work together to support GPs and the wider primary care community in ensuring that high quality palliative care is available across the UK as close to people’s homes as possible.

 The new one-year Spotlight project, which builds on the foundations of the previous three-year Clinical Priorities programme, will identify best practice in end of life care pathways and aims to work with other professional bodies to ensure this best practice is widely disseminated.  The project will also be offering learning and sharing experience to GPs and their practice staff.  In 2016 the RCGP will also be publishing an end of life care position statement which will be tailored to the specific healthcare system in each of the four nations of the UK.

Alongside the project the RCGP and Marie Curie are undertaking a survey of all GP Practices in the UK.  This survey will mirror one undertaken five years ago enabling a view of how general practice is currently addressing palliative care needs in the community and how this might have changed over recent years.

The Spotlight project will be led by Kingston CCG GP, Dr Catherine Millington-Sanders, who holds the Marie Curie National Clinical End of Life Care Champion role at the RCGP. 

Dr Millington-Sanders said: “We are delighted to be able to continue to build on the successes of our work with general practice. This synergistic partnership has offered the opportunity to start influencing policy as well as practically supporting GPs, practice staff and commissioners with educational events and resources. Following feedback in our 2015 EOLC GP survey, we are proud to have developed our Palliative and End of Life Care Toolkit, bringing together a range of practical tools as well as key guidance documents for healthcare professionals to support patients, and their families, who are nearing the end of their lives.

“We want to ensure that outputs from the programme make a real difference; both supporting GPs and their staff as well as improving care for patients and their families. For this reason we have established our GP Advisory Forum with around 200 GPs committed to supporting the programme. In addition, we are working with Marie Curie's Expert Voices (people who have had first-hand experience of end-of-life care) and RCGP Patient Advisory Groups to widen our vision on how we can best develop our focus around patient-centred care.

“Over the next year the programme will actively support appraisals and regulatory monitoring in addition to improving the quality of end of life care given to patients and their families.” 

Professor Bill Noble, Executive Medical Director at Marie Curie, said: “Our work with the RCGP continues to improve our understanding of how Marie Curie can best work with primary care.  We know that the number of people dying over the coming years is set to increase and that people will have increasingly complex needs at the ends of their lives.  

 "Expertise, care and support needs to be firmly rooted in the community, so work done now with GPs and their practices is vital if care is going to be of the highest quality, available to all who want to be cared for at home.

 “We are particularly pleased to be able to support a national audit of end of life care in general practice which will present a picture of general practice end of life care today and how it might have changed over recent years.”

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