St Christopher’s Hospice launched a new three-year strategy in 2023. A key focus of the strategy is on tackling inequalities in end of life care. As part of this, the hospice needed a way to find out:
Who is getting hospice care, and who is missing out?
Which local health and care services are referring people to the hospice, and which are not?
What can the hospice do to improve engagement across the community?
Is this engagement work resulting in more equitable care?
Outcomes
St Christopher’s works closely with the NHS, and aligns its community teams with the primary care networks (PCNs) in the local area. There are 40 PCNs in the hospice’s footprint.
They developed a dashboard that shows a range of data for each PCN:
2021 Census data about the ethnicity, languages, country of birth, religion and age of the local population
Data about deprivation from the Office for National Statistics (ONS)
Data about referrals to the hospice (from the hospice’s own records).
This data enables St Christopher’s to see how the demographics of the people the hospice cares for might differ from the demographics of each local area. It can identify groups of people who are missing out on hospice care and highlight areas where there are fewer referrals to the hospice.
This means the community teams can plan and prioritise their engagement work. For example, they tailored a recent poster campaign to each area by making sure the local ethnicities were represented and by translating the slogan into locally spoken languages.
Facilitators, challenges and advice
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Key facilitators
This type of data work requires specialist skills. The hospice was fortunate to have a volunteer with the right knowledge, who is now employed as a Bank staff member to carry out the project.
Challenges
Some data, such as the 2021 Census data, is freely available but is only broken down to borough level. To get the data at a local level the hospice needed to develop a ‘decoder’ that would provide information for each primary care network.
Tips and advice
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What is most useful for your strategy? Think about the data you need and how it will help you meet your goals.
Tell partners about what you’re doing. Ask for help and advice – “I need data about this, do you know how I can get it?”.
Future development
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In the next phase of the project, St Christopher’s plans to gather information about:
patients that are conveyed to the hospice and hospital from care homes (London Ambulance data)
registered charities working in each community
the number of patients on GPs’ end of life care registers
information about health inequalities in each PCN (esp terminal conditions)
data on Advance Care Planning.
They would also like to develop dashboards at Borough and Integrated Care System (ICS) level.
This data will then be used to give tailored inductions for community staff, about the area they will be working in. It will be made available at different reporting levels for key staff across St Christopher’s, so it can be used by all teams to monitor and improve equity of care.
