Mission to improve palliative care

Dr Katherine Froggatt wants better end-of-life choices for the sick

A palliative care expert is to travel round the world to find ways that the UK can improve the care it gives to terminally-ill people.

Experts are concerned that palliative care services in the UK are not adapting quickly enough to create growing demand as the population grows older.

They say that terminally-ill patients are often not being empowered to take decisions about their own care.

Some are even removed from the care homes where they have lived for years and put into hospital or hospices to die, when they would rather have stayed where they were.

A lack of resources and support networks has been blamed for forcing many elderly patients into more medical settings to die.

Lessons

Now cancer expert Dr Katherine Froggatt is to cross the globe in the hope of learning from other countries how the problem can be tackled.

She has been awarded a special travel grant to spend eight weeks touring Canada and Australia, who have both taken concrete steps to improve palliative care for the elderly.

Dr Froggatt will talk to palliative care experts and patients about their experiences - and hopes the information she will gather can be used to implement improvements when she returns to the UK.

"We are realising we have an ageing population.

"I hope to use the knowledge and experience I gain to identify ways to help develop better care for terminally-ill older people in the UK, to establish a network of people interested in developing the provision of this care".

She added that she also wanted "to find further ways to help nursing and ancillary staff in care homes develop practice to ensure older people can stay in these homes and die in the way of their choosing".

I think a lot of people would like to keep living where they are until they die

Dr Katherine Froggatt

The Australian government has recently invested half a million dollars into developing palliative care guidelines especially for nursing homes.

The guidelines stress the need to do everything possible to maintain the patient's dignity and independence at all times, and to ensure they are cared for in the environment of choice.

They also highlight the importance of recognising and reacting to the emotional needs, both of the patient and their family.

In Canada, health experts have produced a National Guide for End of Life Care for Seniors.

This too stresses the need to treat patients in an humane way.

Dr Margaret Ross, one of the authors, said: "We talk about living and dying well in later life."

Only last year a discussion paper by the King's Fund said the NHS was failing to provide adequate emotional or practical support for the terminally ill.

Decisions

Dr Froggatt, who is a Macmillan-funded Senior Research Fellow and Head of the Macmillan Practice Development Unit at the University of Southampton, agrees and wants to see how the elderly can be better included in important decisions about their own care.

"It has been quite neglected.

"I think a lot of people would like to keep living where they are until they die, where the staff have got to know them, but because the homes cannot get the wider support they can't."

The information gained on Dr Froggatt's trip will be fed back to the National Council for Hospice and specialist palliative care service, of which she is a member, and used to shape further services.

Dame Gill Oliver, director of service development at Macmillan Cancer Relief, said: "We are delighted to learn that Dr Froggatt has been awarded a Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship.

"Her visits to Australia and Canada will allow her to gather information that will enhance the provision of palliative care for elderly people in the United Kingdom, and ultimately improve the standards of care that people affected by cancer should expect throughout their disease but also, more particularly, to ensure the best possible support in the last weeks and months of their life. "