Independent Evaluation of the Marie Curie ‘Delivering Choice Programme’
The Marie Curie ‘Delivering Choice Programme’ is for people with life limiting illnesses. The programme aims to help people to be cared for and die in the place of their choice. Working in partnership with health and social care providers, the programme aims to redesign services in order to provide choice to patients for place of care and death, enhance the access to services, and improve information and support to patients and their carers. Additionally, the programme seeks to understand the economic impact of provision of services in the community.
The Purpose of the evaluation is:
- To establish a baseline picture of the current state of services in Lincolnshire, Tayside and Leeds.
- To examine, according to selected criteria, the impact of the interventions introduced by Marie Curie to improve services.
The areas of enquiry are:
- Implementation of 24 hour services to serve local needs and allow more people to be cared for and die in the place of their choice
- Access and barriers to palliative care services
- Co-ordination and communication between stakeholders
- Information provision to patients and carers, and relationship to informed choices about place of care
How we will do this?
We will use a range of different methods:
- Interviews
- Focus groups
- Questionnaires
- Written documents, policies and data
We will be interviewing:
- Health Professionals
- Directors and Managers of services
- Patients and their family carers
- Bereaved family carers
We will hold focus groups with:
- Palliative care nurse specialists or Macmillan Nurses
- Heart Failure Nurses
- Marie Curie Nurses
Questionnaires will be sent to:
- General Practitioners
- District Nurses
Using these ways to collect information, we will explore the different experiences and perceptions of the quality of services and care. We will also ask the health professionals and service managers about the costs of providing care services.
We will look at documents and databases to:
- Record the reasons why patients with life limiting illnesses have been admitted to hospital.
- Find out how doctors and nurses are diagnosing and recording the palliative care needs of patients with life limiting illnesses.
- Find out how patients are referred to any specialist services.
- Find out the reasons why these patients call General Practitioners out of hours services.
We will also search national and local databases to find out about the local population including their health and standard of living.
We will carry out these activities before Marie Curie Cancer Care develop their new services and again after the new services have been running for at least a year. We will then be able to evaluate the differences that the Marie Curie ‘Delivering Choice Programme’ service improvements have made for patients, health care professionals and service managers and directors.
