In this post Helen Vernon, advocate at Sefton Pensioners Advocacy Centre (SPAC), talks about collaboration, compassion, choice and advocacy:
In February I attended an excellent conference called Palliative End of Life Care: Collaboration, Compassion, Choice. The event was attended by a wide range of interested parties including commissioners, consultants, GP’s, nurses and members of the voluntary sector.
One interesting thing that almost every speaker opted to do was to relate their speech to their own personal experience of losing a family member. This had been the motivation for each of them to follow their career path, either because the experience had been so poor or because they wanted to replicate a positive experience for others.
There were several key pieces of information that came out of the day and I have attempted to summarise some of these below.
The keynote speaker was Jacquie White who is the Deputy Director for Long Term Conditions in NHS England with responsibility for improving the quality of life and experience of end of life care for people with Long Term Conditions and their carers. As part of her presentation she showed this slide about the six ambitions she would like health and care professionals to sign up to to achieve improvements in care. There are obvious links between these ambitions and advocacy.
Jacquie also spoke about their plans to develop an “orientation” process for people who have been diagnosed with a long term condition and she described it as a ‘how to’ for living with that condition. If this became the norm there must surely be a place for advocacy within this programme.
Alison Colclough from St Luke’s Hospice in Chester spoke about their homelessness project and whether people who are street homeless get choice at the end of their life. This also resonated strongly with our advocacy work and it made me consider whether we have explored this sufficiently when we are promoting our service.
The theme of collaboration ran strongly throughout the day and there was a lot of advice about how this could be achieved. There were stories of success and advice about approaches to improving inter agency working. Annamarie Challinor, Head of Service Development (Macmillan) for The End of Life Project shared this image with us, which we could use as a visual reminder of how broadly we are promoting the COPA project.
Helen Vernon, Advocate, Sefton Pensioners Advocacy Centre (SPAC)
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