Hospices and specialist palliative care units are a valuable learning resource for supporting and enabling generalists to improve patient care at end of life. The QELCA© programme is an innovation in end of life care education. It was originally designed by St Christopher’s Hospice, to empower teams of clinical nurse managers from acute, community or care home settings to lead on the delivery of high quality care to patients and families at the end of life. However, it is now being rolled out to other disciplines and settings.

QELCA© has been formally evaluated in partnership with the King’s Fund. A full evaluation report is available on request from Liz Bryan at l.bryan@stchristophers.org.uk. It has since been rolled out nationally to acute nurses in collaboration with Help the Hospices and NHS Improving Quality (formally the End of Life Care Programme). An executive summary of that evaluation report for 2012/13 is available here.