Hospice at Home

Our hospice at home nurses can:

• provide round-the-clock access to specialist nursing care in your own home
• help you draw up a personal care plan documenting your wishes for how you wish to be cared for, to ensure these wishes are respected
• help co-ordinate your care by liaising with other professionals involved in looking after you
• make scheduled nursing visits so you can plan, prepare and discuss your care with the experts
• make emergency home visits, with nurses available on-call 24/7, to help to keep you safe and comfortable at home, with your family
• advise on medication, monitor the effects and recommend adjustments as necessary
• some of our Clinical Nurse Specialists are also able to prescribe medication to respond more quickly to your needs
• treat symptoms as soon as they start, you often won’t need to go to hospital
• ensure family members feel supported too, because you or they can call the nurses any time, 24/7

Our hospice at home healthcare assistants can:

• monitor and review your care, working closely with our nursing team
• help with personal care until formal arrangements are in place
• advise family members on how to help care for you

We’re able to support patients within our Herts/Bucks catchment area who require specialist palliative care towards the end of his or her life. End-of-life, in line with the national standards, is defined as being within the last year of life. Of course, this is not always easy to predict. Some patients may still be in active treatment but are high risk with specialist care needs. If you think you or a loved one may qualify, talk to your GP about a referral.

Our catchment areas for this service span Bucks and Herts, broadly aligning with the boundaries of the NHS Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) in these areas. For this reason, we base our catchment area on the location of the patient’s GP rather than their own home.

All our care is provided at no cost to patients or family members, thanks to the generous support of the local community who cover around 91% of our costs each year.

Our care is not means tested and people with private health are encouraged to share their insurer details with us. Some insurers will pay a contribution towards the cost of the nursing care we provide, which helps our funds go further.

If you are a patient or carer, you can

• ask your GP to refer you to ‘Rennie Grove’s Hospice at Home service’ (if you make the request by email you may wish to copy and paste this link into the email for reference)

OR

• get in touch with us to discuss the service in more detail.  We’ll be happy to answer any questions you may have, and then either talk you through the referral process or match you to another one of our services which better meets your current needs.

If you are a health professional wishing to make a referral, please visit our Referring to Hospice at Home page for more information: