Specialist Palliative Care
The role of our Specialist Palliative Care Team is to actively care and to try and improve the quality of life for our patients, and their families, who are facing life threatening illness. Palliative care enables patients to live as well as possible at the end of life.
Caring for people at the end of their lives is an important role for many health and social care professionals.
End of life care helps all those with advanced, progressive, incurable illness to live as well as possible until they die. It enables the needs of both patient and family to be identified and met during the last phase of their life and into bereavement. It includes management of pain and other symptoms and the provision of psychological, social, spiritual and practical support.
What our service does
The Specialist Palliative Care Team works within the inpatient and outpatient setting at the Liverpool Heart and Chest Hospital
As a team we aim support patients and their families to control symptoms to provide relevant information to ensure referrals and signpost to relevant services to continue care and support when discharged from the hospital. We aim to compliment the hospital and primary care teams in providing specialist palliative care to all patients with a life limited disease
The Specialist Palliative Care Service at Liverpool Heart and Chest Hospital comprises:
A variety of staff from a range of disciplines work within the team including:
- Medical Clinical Lead Consultant ( Tuesday and Friday)
- Specialist Palliative Care Clinical Nurse Specialists
- Specialist Palliative Occupational Therapist
- Specialist Palliative Social Workers
The combined services aim to:
- Provide relief from pain and other distressing symptoms
- Integrate the psychological and spiritual aspects of patient care
- Provide support early in the course of an illness in conjunction with other treatments
- Maintain maximum independence for patients with their activities of daily living
- Provide support to help patients to live as actively as possible until death and to help the family to cope during the patient’s illness and in their own bereavement support
- Provide support to cancer specific multidisciplinary teams
- Provide educational programmes for hospital staff
- Take a lead within the Trust to provide End of Life Care planning
What can we offer patients?
- Advice on pain control
- Advice on control of other symptoms such as breathlessness, nausea, constipation and poor appetite.
- Provide support for rapid discharge of patients at the end of their life
- Support and advice for inpatients and outpatients and their carers
- Advice and support to other health care professionals
- Information for families and carers after bereavement
How to contact our team
Members of staff in the hospital can contact the team on behalf of patients or carers and can they contact the team directly. Staff from the team will visit inpatients and outpatients as and when requested.
The team is available Monday – Friday, 9am to 5pm.
Call 0151 600 1630 /0151 600 1247 or bleep the team via the hospital switchboard on 0151 600 1616. Alternatively Email SPCT@lhch.nhs.uk
Outpatient clinics
The Specialist Palliative Care Outpatient Clinic is held every Friday morning and runs alongside the Lung Cancer, Lung surgical Clinics and Oncology Clinic at Liverpool Heart and Chest Hospital. Specialist Palliative Care CNS’s can also review patients in other clinics throughout the week if required alongside their medical team.
Patients attending these clinics are asked to bring a recent prescription or their medications.