A TEAM of care professionals who work at a specialist dementia care home in Plymouth have been recognised for delivering excellent end-of-life care by St Luke’s Hospice in Plymouth, marking the fourth consecutive time staff at the home have been recognised for the excellent way they implement the charity’s focused Six Steps + programme.
The four colleagues who have taken on the mantle of Butterfly Lodge’s end-of-life champions are service manager Clare Sinclair, nurse and clinical lead Ivorine Ramkishun, senior care assistant Michelle Fletcher and care assistant Joanne Mason.
Clare said: “Six Steps + is a really excellent programme because it incorporates all aspects of end-of-life care and equips us care professionals to initiate appropriate individualised care in the months that precede end-of-life, as well as making sure our residents’ wishes are respected right up to the end.
“Providing excellent end-of-life care is so important because it’s the last thing you can do for someone, and we want their passing to be dignified, pain-free and as ‘right’ as it can be for loved ones too.
“Six Steps + is an intensive course which covers so many of the potentially difficult aspects of caring for someone as they approach their final days, and their workshops address the challenge of providing high quality care to the frail elderly and the cognitively impaired.
“The programme requires you to learn how to recognise deterioration in a person’s overall condition which may signal end-of-life, and how to act promptly to get the right support in place – lots of useful elements of planning and implementation.
“It also encourages you to be open about acknowledging the realities of dying, the importance of communication – including appropriate vocabulary – and addresses the significance of respecting an individual’s last wishes.”
The Butterfly Lodge team has already formulated a new ‘future wishes’ programme as part of its revised care planning system based on knowledge gained from the Six Steps + training, to ensure that residents’ wishes for their end-of-life are recorded and followed.