Quality of care
Our mission is to promote and provide skilled and compassionate palliative care of the highest quality working in and through our communities.
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.
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
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 2022/23 (PDF)CQC Inspection Reports
The CQC last inspected St Christopher’s in December 2019 and rated us as ‘Outstanding’ overall. Download the full inspection report published in March 2020.
A CQC Inspector from the National Direct Monitoring Team had a telephone meeting with Jan Noble (Registered Manager) on 14th December 2022 and the team also reviewed information and data about our service. The CQC inspector concluded that no further regulatory activity was required at that time but advised that the position is kept under review and may be subject to change at any time.
