Quality of care and CQC report
Our mission is to promote and provide skilled and compassionate palliative care of the highest quality working in and through our communities.
Quick links
- Feedback
- Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF)
- St Christopher’s Quality Account
- CQC Inspection Reports
- Downloads
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 working in and through our communities. 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, carers and families and we have a robust governance framework that supports us to do this.
We are regulated by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) 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.
Feedback – 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.
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 and carers.
We gather feedback in a number of different ways:
- We get lots of spontaneous compliments, feedback and comments
- We receive cards, letters, emails and verbal feedback
- We send out survey questionnaires
- The patient survey & carer survey are sent out twice a year
- ‘Your views on our care’ is sent to the next of kin 3 months after death
- We ask people for feedback in real time when they have visited the main hospice building and are signing out
- We invite patients and carers (on alternate months) to take part in focus groups
What is Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF)?
St Christopher’s Hospice aims to provide safe, effective care at all times, but as in all health and care settings, events do occur on occasion. As an organisation, we support an open culture of reporting, including the reporting of near misses, to promote learning and improvements in the safety for all those that use or visit our services.
The Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF) is the new way that healthcare organisations, including the NHS and hospices, look at safety events. It replaces the old Serious Incident Framework (SIF) and is a significant shift in how we respond to events and share learning.
PSIRF enables the development and maintenance of more effective and responsive safety processes. It encourages more compassionate engagement and involvement for those affected by events and gives staff involved support and space for reflection and learning.
PSIRF helps us to understand how incidents happen, allowing us to learn and improve and in turn, create a safer care system.
The four key aims of PSIRF are:
- Compassionate engagement and involvement of those affected by patient safety incidents
- Application of a range of system-based approaches to learning from patient safety incidents
- Considered and proportionate responses to patient safety incidents
- Supportive oversight focused on strengthening response system functioning and improvement
PSIRF Policy and Plan
The aim of our PSIRF policy and plan is to provide guidance and clarity as to how we intend to embed the new framework and respond compassionately to patient safety incidents.
For more information please contact the Quality Team – feedback@stchristophers.org.uk
St Christopher’s Quality Account
From undertaking regular infection control and prevention checks, gathering all kinds of feedback from our patients and their families, to making sure we learn from any incidents and accidents that may happen, St Christopher’s undertakes a wide range of quality improvement activities.
Each year we include information on our quality improvement activities from the previous year and identify our quality improvement priorities for the year to come in our Quality Account which is published on our website each year in July.
Quality Account 2025/26 (PDF)CQC Inspection Reports
CQC carried out a focused assessment of safeguarding at the hospice in June 2026.
The inspectors checked that people were safe and protected from bullying, harassment, avoidable harm, neglect, abuse and discrimination. They found that our service had an open learning culture and people could raise concerns, that managers investigated safeguarding incidents thoroughly and that people were protected and kept safe.
“The evidence showed a good standard. The service worked with people and healthcare partners to understand what being safe meant to them and the best way to achieve that. They concentrated on improving people’s lives while protecting their right to live in safety, free from bullying, harassment, abuse, discrimination, avoidable harm and neglect”. From the CQC report
At the last CQC inspection in 2019 the ‘Safe’ key question was rated as ‘Good‘. CQC did not rate ‘Safe’ during this assessment, therefore the ‘Good‘ rating remained unchanged.
The report, published on 18 August 2026 can be found on the CQC website here.
The last full CQC inspection at St Christopher’s was in December 2019, as an outcome of the focused inspection in June 2026, we have maintained our overall ‘Outstanding’ rating.
Download the full inspection report published in March 2020.
