St Christopher's Hospice

Updated 11 March 2020

St Christopher’s Hospice is operated by St Christophers Hospice. The hospice opened in 1967 and is based in Sydenham. The hospice primarily serves the communities of South London and covers the areas of Southwark, Lewisham, Lambeth, Croydon and Bromley.

The hospice cares for people in their own homes, ran an outpatient service and an inpatient unit, based in Sydenham. It also ran a frailty service and a palliative heart failure service in conjunction with Bromley Clinical Commissioning Group. The hospice also provided services designed to support families and carers including bereavement support, welfare advice and support groups for children or young adults.

The hospice has had a registered manager in post since November 2018. A registered manager is a person who has registered with the Care Quality Commission to manage the service. They have legal responsibility for meeting the requirements set out in the Health and Social Care Act 2008.

The hospice was last inspected in 2015, by our adult social care team, and was rated outstanding overall. We inspected the hospice on 11 and 12 December 2019, our inspection was unannounced.

Updated 11 March 2020

St Christopher’s Hospice is operated by St Christophers Hospice. It has 38 beds and provides hospice care for adults including inpatient care, outpatient clinics and community services. We inspected all of these areas.

We inspected this hospice using our comprehensive inspection methodology and carried out the unannounced inspection on 11th and 12th December 2019.

To get to the heart of patients’ experiences of care and treatment, we ask the same five questions of all services: are they safe, effective, caring, responsive to people's needs, and well-led? Where we have a legal duty to do so we rate services’ performance against each key question as outstanding, good, requires improvement or inadequate.

Throughout the inspection, we took account of what people told us and how the provider understood and complied with the Mental Capacity Act 2005.

The main service provided by this hospice is palliative care and care of the dying.

Services we rate

Our rating of this hospice stayed the same. We rated it as Outstanding overall, because:

• Staff and volunteers proactively kept patients safe from avoidable harm and abuse. Staff regularly completed thorough risk assessments to tailor care.

• Patient care was accurately recorded, and these records were available to staff when required including to consultants off site when on call.

• Staff and volunteers had appropriate training to care for patients. Training needs were regularly assessed, and staff told us they were able to access learning to improve the level of care they were able to offer.

• Services were designed to meet patients changing, and often complex, needs.

• Staff cared for patients with compassion and treated them with dignity and respect. Staff saw each patient as an individual and involved them in decisions about their care goals.

• The hospice had a range of bereavement support to allow relatives and carers to access the support they needed.

• The hospice actively reached out to groups that were hard to reach, to enable them to use their services.

• There were clear processes for recording and responding to complaint and concerns, these had been strengthened in the past year.

• Leaders had the skills and abilities to run the hospice and were passionate about the care they delivered. They were aware of the potential risks facing the service and planned to minimise these risks.

• Staff were engaged with the service and told us there was an open, honest and caring culture.

• The hospice actively involved patients and staff in decisions about changes to services.

• The hospice had a clear vision of what it wanted to achieve and a strategy to make this happen.

However, we also found the following issues that the service provider needs to improve:

• The infection control policy, after death, was not fully being adhered to, therefore potentially putting staff at risk.

Nigel Acheson

Deputy Chief Inspector of Hospitals (London and South)

Updated 11 March 2020

St Christopher’s Hospice provides care for patients in Bromley, Southwark, Lewisham and Lambeth and Croydon. It has a main inpatient and outpatient base in Sydenham, with some staff working from the Bromley site. The service also has a large community branch to provide specialist care in the community.

We rated the hospice as outstanding overall as it was good for safe, and caring and outstanding for effective, responsive and well led.