Palliative and End of Life CareImprove pharmacy's contribution
to patient care.
Help people shape their own medicines and care pathway.
Our new policy focuses on making sure patients who require palliative and end of life care can access the full range of pharmacy expertise, maximising safe and appropriate medicines care as part of multidisciplinary care models. To help get our recommendations implemented, we've aligned the policy to the Welsh Government and NHS Wales’s Palliative and End of Life Care Delivery Plan, published in March 2017.
Why we need a policy
Making sure that a person’s death is as peaceful and pain-free as possible is one the most important responsibilities held by our health and social care systems. Making it happen requires a coordinated and well planned approach that has input from the patient, their family, and from a range of health and social care professionals.
'Integrating the expertise of the pharmacy team into multidisciplinary approaches to palliative and end of life care will improve the care, safety and quality of medicines use for patients.'
What we want to happen
By drawing on advice from experts within the pharmacy profession as well as other health and social care professionals and patient representative groups, five key themes have been identified as areas for immediate support from the pharmacy team:
- Supporting and Informing Patients
- Timely Access
- Workforce
- Education and Training
- Paediatric palliative and end of life care
The recommendations in this policy will be aimed at the people and organisations who collectively have responsibility for improving care for people living with a life limiting illness.
We launched the policy at our Medicines Safety Conference in Cardiff on November 22, and we'll now be calling on Welsh Government to implement our recommendations as soon as possible.