Community-based Nursing and Social Work support for home-based Palliative and End of Life Care: A Qualitative Enquiry

Current statistics in the UK and Ireland point to steadily increasing numbers of people dying in their own homes. This demand combined with a sustained lack of funding and resources means that palliative and end of life care services are rapidly hurtling toward crisis. In a ‘grassroots’ response, a rural community organisation, ‘Life and Time’, mobilised volunteers and paid nursing staff to provide end of life nursing care to people who wish to die at home. As well as symptom control and medication management, the service designed a social work support intervention, which involved engaging therapeutically and adopting holistic, personalised and tailored approaches. This is a powerful example of a community’s capacity to come together and respond to its own needs. Very few studies have gathered service user feedback on community-based palliative and end of life care. This study does that and also offers some insights into how this organisation can efficiently and effectively design and deliver safe and effective care, timely and personalised support to individuals and families pre and post bereavement.