Results of a national survey of support to adult care homes in England: A specialist palliative care provider perspective

This report is the first study at a national level of specialist palliative care support to care homes. It combines quantitative and qualitative approaches to give an extraordinary insight into the challenges faced by care homes and specialist palliative care services supporting them to provide high quality end of life care. It is full of examples of good practice and moving quotes and vignettes illustrating the strong desire to provide good care at the end of life to people nearing the end of life in care homes. Importantly, this report adds another piece of evidence to help drive forward the Ambitions for Palliative and End of Life Care, in particular the second ambition: each person gets fair access to care.

Public Health England commissioned this report with research carried out by the Marie Curie Palliative Care Research Centre at Cardiff University to better understand the nature and extent of specialist palliative care support provided to care homes.