< Back
1
Nov
2024

Autumn 2024 newsletter

Welcome to the Autumn 2024 newsletter from Supportive Care UK.

We've had a busy few months, including welcoming two acute hospitals into the SCUK family; Queen's Hospital in Romford and Harefield Hospital, just outside London. If you know of any other hospitals that might benefit from our consultant-level support, please do encourage them to contact us.

In the meantime, here are some other highlights from the last few months, as well as some updates about new opportunities and services.

As you may know, we have developed a new service, a remote palliative care pharmacy, which we've been piloting with St Mary's Hospice in Ulverston.

Now we'd like to give you the chance to find out more about it by joining us for a free webinar, on Wednesday 4 December at 2pm. It will be hosted by Janki Patel, a consultant pharmacist specialising in palliative medicine; Dr Katharine Bibby from St Mary's Hospice; and our CEO Charlotte Healey.

The service is being delivered by five palliative care pharmacists, and will help you get specialist advice and reassurance about the best medication to prescribe for each patient, how to optimise safety and effectiveness, and suitable alternatives in times of shortages.

If you feel you need more specialist pharmaceutical advice than you're currently getting, joining our webinar is a great place to start. You can sign up using the button below, and read more information about the service here.

Sign up to free webinar

"
Our medical team find the remote palliative care pharmacy meetings extremely beneficial. They have found learning points from every meeting and feel assured of quality because the prescribing they do has specialist oversight.

Val Stangoe, St Mary's Hospice

You may have noticed over the last month that your advice proformas have been arriving via the Health and Social Care Network. This is part of an 18-month development of an advanced software system, which we've codenamed 'the Portal'.

As well as maximising data safety and patient confidentiality, the Portal is making it easier for us to access, analyse and discuss the advice our consultants are giving. This will lead to smoother handovers and improved shared knowledge, all of which ultimately benefits patients.

Over the next few months, we'll be refining the Portal to allow you to access our notes, reports and analysis regarding your patients. Look out for an email explaining more, and please do let us know if you experience any teething issues with the new system.

It has always been our intention, once we were financially able, to support palliative care elsewhere in the world by giving a percentage of our profits to relevant charities.

So we recently donated £12,000 to EMMS, one of the oldest charities in Scotland, who work with partner organisations in Nepal, Malawi, Zambia and Rwanda to develop and support palliative care provision. Our donation is going towards EMMS' Malawi Food Crisis Emergency Appeal, providing food to palliative care patients and their families, who are extra vulnerable in times of emergency.

This is just the beginning of our charitable focus; we're exploring the different ways we can help other countries develop their palliative care provision, and will keep you posted about how we bring our intentions to life.

Malawi Food Crisis Emergency Appeal

We're really looking forward to attending this year's Hospice UK event, which is taking place in Glasgow between 26 and 28 November. Our CEO Charlotte Healey, along with Paula Hall, Lucy Flynn and Lauren Brown, will be setting up camp on Stand 19, ready to chat about the different ways we support hospices all over the UK. We'd love to catch up with any of you who are there, so please do come and say hello.

We're all about making a difference to our partners and their patients, so we've started an awards initiative to celebrate the members of our team who are doing just that.

Who's making a difference?

Our second winner is Lauren Brown, our operations manager and all round superstar. She's been working in her current role since February 2023, and we can't imagine what we'd do without her.

What's she doing to stand out?

Lauren is like the oil that makes the SCUK engine run smoothly.  She is a talented individual who is unfailingly reliable and efficient, as well as being an absolute pleasure to work with. Whether she's working with a new partner, business team colleague or consultant, she is consistently professional, proficient and highly responsive, managing to spin multiple plates with a smile on her face.

Our team say:

"I feel like we won the lottery when we recruited Lauren to our business team full time. She represents everything Supportive Care UK stands for and is the most brilliant ambassador for our company and all those that work within it. Thank you Lauren for bringing your skill and efficiency to the organisation. You thoroughly deserve this recognition!"
Charlotte Healey, CEO

Lauren says:

"I love working in such a busy, buzzy organisation; it's not always easy but there is always something new going on and I enjoy rising to the challenge that creates. The people I work with are so brilliant our staff, our consultants, and also our partners and I pride myself on making sure that every interaction I have is a positive and valuable one, which helps our service run smoothly."