Wirral Hospice St John's provides specialist palliative care and support for adults with severe and progressive disease, when treatment to cure the disease is no longer possible. The service works in conjunction with Wirral hospital and community specialist palliative care teams to provide an integrated service for people. People are referred to Wirral Hospice St John's by their GP, hospital consultant, or Integrated Specialist Palliative Care Team. The hospice service is available to all, free of charge. We last inspected Wirral Hospice St John’s on 28 November 2013 when we found the service to be compliant in all of the areas we looked at.The service is required to have a registered manager. A registered manager is a person who has registered with the Care Quality Commission to manage the service. Like registered providers, they are ‘registered persons’. Registered persons have legal responsibility for meeting the requirements in the Health and Social Care Act 2008 and associated Regulations about how the service is run. At the time of our visit the service had a registered manager and a number of other senior staff with responsibility for various aspects of the organisation.
The service provides an in-patient service for a maximum of 16 people and day services for a maximum of 12 people per day. They also provide social and emotional support in people’s own homes but this does not include nursing or personal care. People are admitted to the hospice for assessment and management of complex symptoms and rehabilitation following treatment. The average length of stay is approximately two weeks.
Care is provided by a specialist team of doctors, nurses, healthcare assistants, a social worker, physiotherapist, occupational therapist, psychologist and aromatherapist. They are supported by a creative therapist, a chaplain, bereavement counsellors, housekeeping and maintenance teams, education staff, finance, administration and fundraising staff. At the time of the inspection, the service had 502 volunteers working in various roles throughout the organisation.
During our visits we saw that the premises were safe and clean and a programme of regular planned maintenance was in place. We observed that medicines were stored, checked, administered, recorded and disposed of safely.
Staff and volunteers received annual mandatory training and were supported in their roles by the management team. People who used the service had a choice of nutritious meals and every effort was made to accommodate individual dietary needs and preferences. People’s capacity to make decisions and give consent was assessed and recorded.
People were treated with kindness, compassion and respect. The specialist professional advisor commented ‘General observations of interactions between staff, patients, and family members during the visit demonstrated caring, trusting relationships built on genuine respect, and person centred care was being delivered. Patients openly praised staff during introductions and interactions observed, and spoke very highly of the care they received. They all said they felt safe at the hospice and symptom management was effective.’
The quality of the service was assessed and monitored regularly by a series of external and internal auditing tools. People who used the service, and their families, were encouraged to give feedback and their observations and comments were acted on.