Palliative and end of life care

Our aims

The project initially aimed to ensure information about local resources was available and to develop an information sheet for people affected by dementia.

We’re also aiming to create a toolkit for practitioners and promote the relevant training offers available for practitioners within Greater Manchester.

We will also explore a bereavement offer for people affected by dementia.

We’ve worked with the Greater Manchester Palliative and End of Life Care programme and will continue to link with this programme https://peolc.net/about-us/.

Why this matters

We believe dementia should be recognised as a life-limiting condition and therefore palliative care should be available to people living with dementia, from the point of diagnosis until end of life.

As dementia is a progressive condition, it’s important for people to be able to make decisions about their future care early on, before they find it difficult to communicate or they lack the capacity to do so. This is known as advance care planning[1] and ongoing promotion of the importance of advance care planning is required across all aspects of the Greater Manchester system.

It’s important that there are opportunities to review and change the plan as the dementia progresses and if the preferences or needs of the person change. Having an advance care plan ensures that the person with dementia can receive treatment and care according to their preferences, even when they can no longer express them[2].  This links with the Dementia Wellbeing Plan Digitisation work

[1] https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/qs184/chapter/Quality-statement-3-Advance-care-planning

[2] https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/qs184/chapter/Quality-statement-3-Advance-care-planning

What we’ve achieved so far

We’ve developed an information booklet for people affected by dementia, which includes information about palliative and end of life care services in each locality.  We will publish this here as soon as possible and will share widely across the Greater Manchester system.

Relevant national resources are also available here

We’ve linked with national research studies and will continue to seek updates from this work.

We’ve previously supported the developed of the Let’s Talk About Death Shall We leaflet

What’s next?

We’ll publish the information booklet for people affected by dementia here as soon as possible.

We’re currently developing a toolkit for practitioners and will share this here when it is available.  This will include information about dementia palliative and end of life care training available for practitioners and people affected by dementia.

In future, we’ll explore bereavement offers for people affected by dementia, working with partners across Greater Manchester.

We’re continuing to promote awareness of dementia as a life-limiting condition across all forums within Greater Manchester, including through the Dementia and Brain Health Quality Standards work  and improving quality and experience of diagnosis work.