Case study:

11 May 2010

Palliative Care website in North Cumbria

Key points

Palliative care professionals in North Cumbria have developed a website which helps isolated GPs offer support to people dying at home.

The website provides clear, simple, high quality information on key palliative care topics, details and links to local and national educational events, full listings of all North Cumbria palliative care services and easy links to local and national tools and guidelines.

One of the main reasons for setting up the website was that North Cumbria has high cancer death rates, alongside challenges of rurality and deprivation.

This can mean there is limited access to 24-hour specialist medical advice.

Many patients express the wish to die at home and home death rates are well above the national average.

It was felt many hospital admissions at the end of life were potentially preventable if GPs had easy access to simple, practical information on common prescribing interventions, syringe driver prescribing, common symptom management and appropriate spiritual support.

A small core group, consisting of the consultant to West Cumbria Hospice at home, the Macmillan GP adviser and the lead palliative care nurse North Cumbria, made links with key partners to agree what was needed.

Aided by a £5,000 grant from the strategic health authority, the site structure and content was built up and then piloted before being launched in 2005.

Feedback on the website has generally been extremely positive.

One RCGP director of palliative care education in the North West commented: ‘This is the most exciting development in improving access to palliative care information I have come across.’

Unfortunately, structural limitations in the NHS web services meant the first version had limited ability to generate site statistics and incorporate evaluation.

A new version is currently being developed which will carry built-in site statistics and more sophisticated feedback.

It can also be easily customised for use by other areas.