Palliative Care

Palliative Care is the care of patients whose disease is advancing and not curable. The aim is to achieve the best possible quality of life by managing the effects of the disease.

Doncaster Community Specialist Palliative Care Team

As the Doncaster Community Specialist Palliative Care Team, we work in partnership with your General Practitioner (GP), District Nurse and other health care professionals.

Referral should be with your consent by the current health care professional looking after your care and made where:

  • The district nurses and the GP have attempted to manage the symptoms and have decided you may benefit from specialist support
  • You have been discharged from the hospital, or the hospice with known complex symptoms that have required the help of the specialist palliative care team during your inpatient stay
  • Attempts have been made by generalist staff, for example, at outpatient clinic, to manage symptoms before referral to the Specialist Palliative Care Team.

In addition, we are able to offer patients and families requiring more palliative care input and support to facilitate remaining in their preferred place of care, by providing enhanced support. We have predominantly health care assistants that can support patients and their loved ones at a most difficult time of life.

Photo of the Team

The Community Team

The Doncaster Community Specialist Palliative Care Team offers specialist advice and support to patients and families/carers in their own home and in our outpatients clinic.

The Team comprises:

  • Clinical Nurse Specialists
  • Health Care Assistants
  • Staff Nurses
  • Doctors.

Some of our Clinical Nurse Specialists are able to prescribe some of the medications you require.

Aims of the service

Our role is to provide complex specialist palliative care symptom management and advice to patients and families in their own home, to support them in living with life limiting illness.

What kind of support we offer

The GPs and District Nurses will manage your care. However, on occasions it will be necessary for them to involve the Doncaster Community Specialist Palliative Care Team.

At your first appointment at your home, the Doncaster Community Specialist Palliative Care Nurse will discuss the best way that they can support you and your family/carers.

Over time, it may be that your problems are well managed and that your Doncaster Community Specialist Palliative Care Team agrees to withdraw you from our services for a period of time. Any plan to do this would be discussed with you and ensure that you have the necessary support, if needed, from other teams e.g. District Nurse and GP.

If your needs change, the Doncaster Community Specialist Palliative Care Team can easily be contacted again by your Doctor or Nurse.

Are we the same as Macmillan Nurses?

The Doncaster Community Specialist Palliative Care Nurses do exactly the same clinical work that Community Macmillan Nurses do in other parts of the UK. However, in Doncaster we are called Nurse Specialists in Palliative Care and are funded by the NHS.

More information about the Specialist Community Palliative Care Service

We run a seven day service, between 8.30am and 4.30pm and can be contacted by phone one 03000 214 666.

At weekends we provide a limited services with Clinical Nurse Specialists providing advice and support for the team on 03000 214 666.

We are not an emergency service.

In the evening and at night, please call:

Single Point of Access on 03000 218996,

If you need a GP, please phone your own GP surgent and listen to instructions.