A chance to improve end-of-life care

Community nurses (CNs) now have a golden opportunity to work closely with GP colleagues in reviewing and improving end-of-life (EoL) care. The new NHS England (2019a) GP contract has attached substantial financial rewards to implementing a locally led EoL quality-improvement project before the end of March 2020. This reflects the aspirations of the NHS long term plan (NHS England, 2019b) to ‘personalise care to improve end-of-life care’. GP contract holders must review recent EoL care provision for patients and implement a tailored project to improve each of the following domains:

As CNs are key to delivering and coordinating EoL care at home (Mitchell et al, 2016), they have an important role to play in this work. The GP contract expects practice teams to work closely with community colleagues in tailoring and delivering the project (NHS England, 2019a). GP practices will retrospectively audit EoL care provision and identify areas for improvement. CNs, as GPs' trusted ‘eyes and ears', are perfectly placed to identify aspects of palliative care that could be improved (Walshe et al, 2008).