By 2023:

1.   Purpose: The Hospice will be a Beacon of excellence delivering adult end of life and specialist palliative care and a bereavement support service for the people of Sutton and Merton. The Hospice will strive to implement best practice in all areas of care and its services, and in its business and fundraising endeavours.

2.   Ethos: The Hospice will provide all its care and services with compassion, dignity and respect by a team of highly skilled staff and volunteers. All team members will have appropriate training and qualifications for their roles and receive ongoing support to be kept up to date.

3.   Engagement: The Hospice will collaborate with all stakeholders in the local health and social economy.

4.   Provision: The Hospice will provide its services without discrimination to all members of the local community according to their needs. It will ensure that services provided meet or exceed the needs and expectations of the Patients, Families[1], Supporters and the community it serves.

5.   Organisation: The Hospice will have separated in 2019 from the Daughters of the Cross of Liège and will be a vibrant and successful independent charity.

6.   Sustainability: The Hospice will be generating sufficient income from fundraising to meet the gap between NHS funding and expenditure, without the need for over reliance on exceptional legacy income.

The future we are seeking for the next five years focuses on the following main areas:

Service Delivery

7.   The Hospice will be ready, in every respect, for an inspection by CQC. The Hospice will be assessed to be Outstanding.

8.   Community Palliative/End of Life care will:

• be provided to those who are able to stay in their own home (including a care home where that is their normal place of residence)
• be modelled on evidence to ensure balance between inpatient and community provision
• be adaptable to respond to changing needs
• include support and respite sits in the patient home for the carers of people with palliative care needs.[2]

9.   Palliative in-patient care will be:

• provided to meet the needs of those who require care that cannot adequately be met in any other setting.
• adaptable to respond to changing needs including being developed in other settings to meet increasing demand.

10.  Therapy services will be:

• provided to patients and their families including post-bereavement support to families for as long as is necessary.
• working collaboratively with other services to develop and support compassionate communities where people who are dying and those close to them do not feel isolated.
• delivering bereavement support to people in the wider community affected by grief as a result of death.

11.  Through advanced care planning, the Hospice will be supporting people who are dying to have the opportunity to express their spirituality and exercise personal choice which is communicated across settings to support consistent care.

12.  The Hospice will be working with other partners including the NHS and single-condition organisations to:

• ensure that patients are cared for and die in the most appropriate place, taking into account their wishes.
• reduce avoidable or inappropriate hospital attendances and admissions
• reduce avoidable GP appointments/visits
• enable patients to live as well as possible until they die, by managing their symptoms as well as possible in accordance with their choices.

13.  The Hospice will be providing its services to people with a wide range of conditions, increasing the number of non-cancer patients, and be able to support patients with multiple comorbidities including dementia.

14.  The Hospice will be working beyond the confines of the Hospice building actively promoting the understanding of "a Hospice without walls".  It will be providing its services from multiple locations throughout Sutton and Merton generally collocated with and in collaboration with other community services but also in patients' own homes.

15.  On the basis of its expertise and following MDT agreement, the Hospice will accept spot commissioning of referrals for patients with conditions that would benefit from specialist palliative care input earlier than the last twelve months of life.

16.  The Hospice specialist staff will be providing authoritative education on end-of –life and palliative care to patients and their families, healthcare professionals and to social care professionals working in any setting, for example, care homes and domiciliary care agencies.  It will have a strong and credible education and training team that provides accredited education and training.  The accreditation will come from strong links to an appropriate academic institution such as the Faculty of Health, Social Care and Education at University of Kingston and St George’s University of London.

17.  The Hospice will be a "Learning Organisation", facilitating learning at the individual, team, and organisational levels to maintain clinical and non-clinical excellence.

Infrastructure

18.  SRH will have good standard, sustainable infrastructure including:

• Modernised buildings that provide good working conditions for its staff and that are used to the maximum (including generating income or other benefits, through us by outside organisations).
• (If the opportunity arises, the Communications and Fundraising Department [not necessarily the Warehouse] will have been collocated with the Hospice.)
• Information systems that maximise the use of technology and inter-operate with the NHS and other health and social care providers to support multi-disciplinary working.
• Digital capabilities that are robust and able to be speedily reinstated in the event of an interruption to business continuity.

Fundraising

19.  SRH will have an effective fundraising capability sufficient to enable the Hospice to achieve its goals through:

• Clear direction and proactive planning in a strategy that is based upon sound data coming from its donor management system and an effective EPOS system for its shops.
• An outstanding donor experience that is highly tailored to each donor's individual situation.  Donors, including those who donate goods to shops, feel appreciated, identify with the aims and ambitions of the Hospice, and see themselves (and are seen by the Hospice) as partners in the pursuit of excellent hospice care.
• Excellent shops that provide customers with a good shopping experience and maximise their income from donated goods whilst recovering the maximum from Gift Aid.  Shops will act as Community Hubs, providing information about hospice service and “how to get involved” across all parts of the Hospice's catchment area.
• A highly developed, integrated digital strategy that includes a website that acts as an outstanding two-way link with donors who will, increasingly, be "digital natives" and will have high expectations of how they will interact with the Hospice.

20.  Fundraising will be efficient and will continue with proven successful initiatives as well as generating new ideas, developing new supporters and bringing in new audiences.  Critical analysis of financial and other results will be applied to identify events and appeals that should be dropped or re-modelled.

Capacity and Sustainability

21.  SRH will maintain the ability to achieve its goals through:

• Clear direction and proactive planning
• Flexibility and modelling
• Financial security
• Workforce skills, security and safety
• Strategic and benchmarking alliances and partnerships that are maintained and expanded.

Leadership and Governance

22.  Through effective corporate and clinical governance, the Senior Management Team and, as applicable, the Trustees will provide:

• Leadership that strives for continuous improvement towards excellence.
• An example to all staff, acting as positive role models.
• Encouragement for the Hospice to be a "learning organisation" with an open and supportive culture of respect.
• Accountability to the Trustees and key stakeholders.
• Strategic direction.
• Financial Sustainability.
• Positive working relationships between staff and the Trustees.
• Regulation and governance with respect to strategic requirements.
• Identification and monitoring of organisational legal obligations and risk.

Profile and Awareness

23.  The Hospice will be implementing an effective communications strategy that ensures that all stakeholders, local people and businesses:

• Recognise our brand and share our values of excellence in palliative and end of life care.
• Understand what services the Hospice offers and how to access them.
• Understands the importance of the Hospice to them and value it as the preferred provider of specialist palliative and end of life care in the local area.
• Continue to be valued stakeholders in the Hospice and partners in current and future planning and development of services.
• Continue to develop a strong partnership with the Local Community
• Are encouraged to support the Hospice through donations, volunteering and attendance at educational and fundraising activities.

Nick Stevens and Gail Linehan, Joint CEOs St Raphael's Hospice

Approved by the St Raphael's Board

Footnotes:

[1] Family is intended to include the friends and loved ones of the patient.

[2] Over the next five years this is likely to be through Hospice@Home and the Compassionate Neighbours programme but new services may be developed perhaps in collaboration with Social services and/or Domiciliary Care providers.