What is Palliative Care?

Palliative care cannot cure the terminally ill, but it can help manage relief from symptoms that are experienced, increasing comfort, promoting dignity and providing patients and their loved ones with a support system.

Having an advanced illness can raise practical, physical and emotional problems, which can affect you and those close to you. St Barnabas House provides a specialist palliative care service to adults and has the expertise and skills to offer advice and support in these areas.

Our goal is to help you to maintain your quality of life within the limits of what is realistically achievable. We will treat you as a whole person, taking into account your life experience and preferences for care.

End of life care planning

Following the endorsement of the principles of palliative care by the Independent Review of the Liverpool Care Pathway, St Barnabas House supports the strong recommendation that there be further investment in palliative care clinical services, as well as better education for all clinicians whose patients may need end of life care.

We continue to work alongside a number of private care homes and NHS staff in providing teaching of proven effectiveness for staff looking after people in their last hours or days of life. The flexible, personalised end of life care plans called for by the Review are an established part of our practice and we have been working with providers in other settings such as care homes to make this approach more widely available.

St Barnabas will continue to maintain a position to ensure that the principles of good palliative care are applied not only for our own patients in the hospice and at home but, through education and training, for dying people across our whole area.