St Giles Hospice CQC Report 2017 St_Giles_Hospice_CQC_Report_2017 | Page 3

resourced and service specific. This enabled effective clinical leadership, staff expertise and knowledge
concerned with people's palliative and end of life care and treatment.
Staff understood the importance of ensuring people received good nutrition and hydration; and the related
support requirements at people's life end stage of care. People accommodated on the inpatient unit were
provided with quality and choice of food and drinks at times to suit them.
Staff understood and followed the Mental Capacity Act 2005 to obtain people's consent or appropriate
authorisation for their care. Manager's checked the related assessment and decision making process to
ensure this was being properly followed. This enabled people's rights in care and helped to protect them
from receiving end of life care that did not meet with their needs, wishes or best interests.
People received care from kind, caring and compassionate staff and volunteers who treated them with
respect and were highly motivated to provide good quality care. Staff understood the importance of
establishing good relationships with people and their families and took time to ensure people's dignity,
rights and involvement in their care. Policy and related staff practice aimed to ensure people received
sensitive and dignified care following death. People and their families were treated as equal partners in
their care, which was regularly reviewed with them. A range of care awards and good practice initiatives,
demonstrated a caring organisation.
People, their families and members of the wider community were informed and supported to understand
and access relevant care, treatment and support options available to them. Twenty four hour timely advice,
support and appropriate care referral helped to ensure this when required. People's relatives and staff had
access to bereavement counselling and emotional support following a person's death for as long as they
needed it. This helped to ensure that staff, people using the service, those that mattered to them and the
wider community received the information and support they needed.
Staff were attentive to and mindful o f the detail of people's lives, how their illness affected them and what
was important for their care and treatment. Timely pain relief, symptom control and emotional support
were well assured and central to people's care provision. When people received life end stage care, they
received this in private, with their families as they wished.
Staff understood and followed people's decisions, wishes and preferences for their care and treatment.
Related record keeping and information sharing systems helped to ensure this. Measures for continuous
service improvement promoted people's timely assessment, referral and involvement in decisions about
their care and treatment. Strategic planning meant the provider engaged closely with the local community
to build links, services and support networks to help shape, inform and support palliative and end of life
care.
The provider had robust systems to report, review and learn from complaints and adverse feedback. People
and their families were routinely consulted about their care experiences and knew how to raise any related
concerns or complaints. Feedback obtained from this was used to inform and make service improvements
when required.
People, their families, staff, volunteers and key stakeholders were confident the service was well managed
and run. All said they would recommend the service to friends and family. Staff and volunteers described an
open, positive culture where they were proud to work, valued and felt they made a real difference to
people's care. All were consulted and involved in way that helped to inform people's care and treatment
provision, service operation and improvement.
3 St Giles Hospice - Whittington Inspection report 24 February 2017