Quality of Care

St Christopher’s sets out to provide the best possible care for people with life-limiting illnesses and those close to them, and all our staff and volunteers play a part in this. Our mission is to promote and provide skilled and compassionate palliative care of the highest quality and we have a national and international reputation for providing care, delivering teaching and engaging in research. We are committed to finding ways continuously of improving our services to patients and families and we have a robust clinical governance framework that enables us to do this.

We are regulated by the Care Quality Commission and comply with the regulations set out in the Health and Social Care Act 2008. We carry out regular audits of our care and services to make sure that we are following best practice. Each year we produce a Quality Account that identifies our priorities for quality improvement over the year to come, and reviews our quality performance over the previous 12 months. You can find our most recent Quality Account on the NHS Choices website*

One of the most important ways we can check how well we are doing is to ask the people on the receiving end of our care: our patients and their families.

Finding out about the experience of patients and their families

Feedback from patients and their families about their experiences of the care and services at St Christopher’s is very important to us because it can tell us what we are doing well and how we may be able to improve.

We get lots of spontaneous compliments and comments but we also set out to find out about people’s experiences in a more systematic way. We do this through regular ‘forum’ meetings with patients that take place every two months. We also use questionnaires:  

SKIPP (St Christopher’s Index of Patient Priorities) is an outcome measure which enables hospices/palliative care providers to assess the impact on patients of the care they deliver and show changes in symptoms over time. It was commissioned by St Christopher’s and developed by Prof Julia Addington-Hall and her research team at Southampton University in collaboration with the St Christopher’s.

It is a validated tool developed primarily for use as a quality measure in palliative care.  Importantly, it takes account of response shift (the fact that patients are likely to recalibrate their assessment of symptoms or quality of life in the light of current experience, and therefore make it difficult to detect change over time).

It consists of a short (11 questions) questionnaire with a follow up version for use if required. The questionnaire comes in three versions, tailored for use in either the inpatient care, home care or day care.

VOICES-SCH is a postal questionnaire based on a well-accepted tool for collecting information from bereaved family or friends in the months after the patient has died (Views of Informal Carers - Evaluation of Services). St Christopher’s collaborated with Prof Julia Addington –Hall to adapt the questionnaire for use in hospices and it is now in routine use.

Healthcare professionals who wish to join the discussion forum about implementation of SKIPP can visit http://forums.stchristophers.org.uk and register on the forum website.