Welcome to the Spring 2023 newsletter from Supportive Care UK; we've got lots of good news to share. Here's what we've been up to since we were last in touch, and what's coming up in the months ahead.

Dedicated daily consultant support and advice

We've developed a new service for Northern Ireland Hospice, which provides a dedicated, daily consultancy slot for their inpatient unit and outreach team. It includes five scheduled interventions each week, each with a different SCUK consultant.This is creating time and space for the teams to discuss patient cases and care, as well as opening up opportunities for professional development and training. And the feedback we've had so far has been really positive, with one clinical manager noting: "Even within a few days, our clinicians were showing huge improvements in their confidence."If you would like to know more about this type of service, please get in touch.

Two new palliative care partnerships

We're also delighted to welcome two other palliative care providers into the SCUK family.

We're providing ad-hoc support for Eastboune's St Wilfrid's Hospice. It's a flexible contract which covers their service if they have hiring gaps, or when their consultants are ill or on holiday.

And we're providing support and advice on the same basis for St Richard's Hospice, part of the Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust.

This flexible provision works like an insurance policy for our partner organisations, giving them access to consultant support that can be scaled up and down when needed. We're looking forward to developing these partnerships further in the months ahead.

Supporting care across North Central London ICB

With newly-established ICBs exploring the best way to deliver care across their units, we have been working with North Central London ICB and North London Hospice to create a new, collaborative model that delivers for all parties.

The result is a three-way partnership in which NLH is the gateway to OOH consultant access, provided by us, across the NCL boroughs. And as well as streamlining provision, it also adds a layer of governance and monitoring that will help all the units involved to refine and develop their own service.

If your ICB is exploring options for OOH provision, and might be interested in knowing more about our new model, please pass this information on.

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Reflecting and planning at Consultant Connect

Since we were last in touch, we've held our annual Consultant Connect event. It's an opportunity to bring our consultants together to reflect on the data and learnings from the previous year and discuss complex cases. And it also gives us the space to celebrate what we've achieved and plan our next steps.

We were particularly pleased to get some really positive feedback from our consultants about why they enjoy working with us. As one said: "I have a sense that what we are doing is making a real difference, and am continually amazed by the skill of the clinicians on the ground. There is a palpable sense of progress, supported by the strong relationships we have established."  

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