Royal College of GPs partnership, year four
In year four, Marie Curie and the RCGP continue working together to support GPs and the wider primary care community in making sure that high quality palliative care is available across the UK as close to people’s homes as possible.
Identifying best practice
The new one-year Spotlight project is building on the foundations of the previous three-year Clinical Priorities programme. The project is led by Kingston CCG GP, Dr Catherine Millington-Sanders, who also holds the Marie Curie National Clinical End of Life Care Champion role at the RCGP.
The project will identify best practice in end of life care pathways, with the aim of working with other professional bodies to ensure examples of best practice are widely disseminated. It will also be offering learning and sharing experience to GPs and their practice staff.
In 2016, the RCGP will be publishing an end of life care position statement which will be tailored to the specific healthcare system in each of the four nations of the UK.
A very exciting part of the Spotlight work will include the development of a new service excellence mark. This mark will help GPs to focus on what is needed to provide excellent end of life care and act as a visible proof of their commitment to doing so. Our vision is that, in time, every doctor's waiting room will be proudly displaying this mark of excellence.
Nationwide GP survey
Alongside the Spotlight project, the RCGP and Marie Curie have carried out a survey of all GP practices across the UK in 2016. This survey mirrored the one undertaken five years ago to gather the views of GPs on how their practices are currently addressing palliative care needs in their communities, and how this might have changed over recent years.
Results from the survey was published in November 2016, highlighting the fact that the majority of GPs struggle to give the time they want to support patients who are terminally ill.
In response to the survey results, Marie Curie has launched a new campaign calling for a UK-wide commission to investigate what resources GPs need to be able to spend the time they want so they can properly support people at the end of their lives.
