Our community care service will be going through some major changes between July 2008 and January 2009.

The service you and your patients get from us during this time may be different from that you received in the past.   Our community team will be sharing responsibility for your patients, rather than each patient talking and seeing the same community nurse all the time.  

During this period, please continue to refer patients to us in your usual way. 

On receipt of your referral:

• one of our clinical team will phone your patient to identify their current needs; and arrange for them to meet the appropriate member of the hospice team.
• following this telephone assessment, most patients will continue to have a home visit.  For others we will offer an outpatient visit, or a direct referral to day services or to the appropriate member of the MDT (eg counselling).
• we will continue to keep you informed of our involvement in your patient’s care following our initial assessment, and we will attend regular case review meetings.

By assessing patients in this way we aim to focus our care on those patients with the highest level of need related to their illness.  This will mean that patients with less active needs will be followed up by telephone.

If you would like to talk to us about an individual patient you are planning to refer, please contact:   Sally Hill, Clinical Admin Co-ordinator, Tel: 01293 447340.   Sally will take your call and direct you to the most appropriate person.

Between September and December 2008 we also have hospice building work planned which will reduce our in-patient capacity by 6 beds.   We aim to keep disruption to in-patient services to a minimum, but there may be a delay in meeting some admission requests during this period.