St. James's Place Charitable Foundation Hospice Grants

Overview

What is the programme?

The Nuffield Trust report has shown that the numbers of people dying at home have stayed up at their COVID levels. This jump has happened without any major shift in resources towards improving, monitoring, or developing new models of care for hospices to address this change.

Additional research funded by National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) found that hospice at home services support most of their patients to achieve a ‘good death’ and to die in their preferred place. What people most valued about hospice at home care in the last days of life was the time given to provide hands-on care and develop relationships in the home, by staff experienced in death and dying. Earlier contact from a hospice at home service also had a positive impact on outcomes, and another important factor for success was support for the family carer in the home.

Grants Programme

This grant programme will support projects that provide hospice/ palliative care for people who are terminally ill and dying at home. Specifically to encourage hospices to expand their services to new client groups as well as their carers/families, by inspiring and funding small innovative projects that will make a tangible difference to people dying at home.

They have included below a broad list of example projects. Some of the areas are about testing new approaches and ways of working. However, if you are already delivering these services, we would be interested in projects that extend the reach so more people can benefit. We are looking to fund examples that are delivering person centred care.

Example projects:

• Hospice Care at Home
• Early identification – Hospice and GPs
• Rapid discharge from hospital to home
• 24/7 Single Point of Contact – Setting up (or enabling access to) a phoneline / advice service
• Volunteers and support for family carers in the home
• Dealing with Distress at End of Life - psychiatry / improving access to psychological support
• At-home support for patients with neurological diseases, the elderly and those with frailty

The intention is that project outputs would lead to examples of best practice, a framework of ‘what good looks like’, opportunity to share issues and encourage hospices to work together to provide a specialist service.

Available funding

Grants of up to £40,000 are available to support projects running over a period of 18 months. This allows for up to 3 months setup phase and 12 months project delivery – with a further 3 months to cover any unforeseen delays mid project.

The grants will enable hospices to initiate or build on programmes of work that will support palliative and end of life care to people dying at home.

Total available funding in this grant round is £500,000. They expect to award between twelve and fifteen grants in this round.

Eligible costs

For the purpose of this grant programme, they consider a ‘project’ to be a discrete range of activities with a clear purpose, designed to bring about change. These activities would normally incur costs over a variety of items, which could include:

• Staff salary. Funding can cover full-time or part-time staffing, or a combination of both 5
• Equipment
• Travel
• Staff training

Please note, if your application is successful, you should allow for the cost of travel to attend the Project Lead Day in your budget. It is expected that the majority of the grant would go towards implementation costs of the service. However, a range of different items should be budgeted for and all must be directly relevant to the project.

Eligibility

Eligible organisations must be based in the UK and members of Hospice UK:

• adult hospices
• children’s hospices.

NB: Hospices awarded a grant in the 2022 Rural and Remote Communities programme are not eligible to apply in this round.

Due to funder restrictions this programme is not open to Marie Curie or Sue Ryder hospices.

Only one application per grant round will be considered from each hospice.

Projects could include

The intention is that outputs from funded projects would lead to examples of best practice, a framework of ‘what good looks like’, opportunity to share issues and encourage hospices to work together to provide a specialist service. Examples of the types of project we could fund include:

• Hospice Care at Home
• Early identification – Hospice and GPs
• Rapid discharge from hospital to home
• 24/7 Single Point of Contact – phoneline / advice service
• Volunteers and support for family carers in the home
• Psychiatry - Dealing with Distress at End of Life.
• At-home support for patients with neurological diseases, the elderly and those with frailty

Notes

Commitments

If you are successful in your application for funding they would expect you to attend a Project Lead Day to meet, develop and learn from each other. The days are facilitated workshops led by their Grants and Clinical Teams to support project set up, troubleshoot, monitor and disseminate learning.

They will support Project Leads throughout the life of their grant, following a Quality Improvement (QI) approach. QI is a systematic methodology which enables staff to design, test, and implement changes using real time measurement for improvement.

They will also share the learning from projects that are funded through this programme. If successful in your application for funding, you will be expected to contribute to this. Additional activities may include:

• submitting a written progress report every three months after your grant has been awarded
• site visits by staff from Hospice UK to evaluate progress access to ongoing support from the Grants and Clinical Teams to ensure that your project goes as smoothly as possible and to offer facilitation to help resolve any issues as they arise
• sharing of ideas and knowledge and peer support through a variety of media and attendance at project lead days and related events
• Contribution of data and outcomes to project evaluation framework
• Taking part in webinars that would form part of a Community of Practice for the duration of the grant period.
• Submitting an abstract for a poster presentation at Hospice UK national conference.

Partnerships

They encourage new projects to be developed and implemented in partnership with others, e.g. internal colleagues/departments, other hospices, hospitals, community groups, local councils or other organisations, in order that they complement existing provision and are truly integrated in systemic plans to reach more people.

Where a project is a collaboration between a hospice and another provider (e.g. NHS or social care) the lead applicant must be a member of Hospice UK. It is essential that letters of support from partners are submitted along with your application