Contents

• Creating an End of Life Care Document: The easy way
• Creating an End of Life Care Document: The more complex way
• Parsing an End of Life Care Document
• List of End of Life Care Document Fields

Background

The majority of people, given the right care and support, would prefer to die at home, yet only around 20% of people die at home, with a further 17% dying in a care home. The Healthcare Commission estimates that half of all acute hospital complaints are related to end of life care.

A key enabler for improving end of live care is the ability to capture and sharing a patient’s end of life care preferences. To help achieve this the NEoLCP is supporting nationwide implementation of local Electronic Palliative Care Co-ordination Systems (EPaCCS) following successful piloting of end of life care “locality registers” in eight sites across England during 2009/11.

One of the issues with many of the current EPaCCS deployments is that the core information within these systems cannot easily be shared electronically with users of other systems in other care settings. The ITK end of life care specification aims to address this by providing a nationally defined standard for exchanging core end of life care information and preferences between IT systems. The clinical content of the message is defined as a HL7 CDA document, and is based on the agreed national information standard for electronic palliative care co-ordination ( ISB1580 ).

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