Extending end of life care with social media

St. Christopher’s Hospice are making a strategic push to extend the services it provides to non-resident patients, aiming to become more of a social hub for those patients. This is an important effort for the hospice given that they can register more than fifteen hundred patients at any given time but have fewer than seventy beds.

As part of that push, the hospice will use their own staff time and receive University of Bath assistance to investigate the extent to which social and collaborative media technologies can be used to reduce the isolation (‘social exclusion’) experienced by many of its non-resident patients. This objective reflects the forward-looking, innovative culture of the hospice.

Hospice and university staff will work together to take the knowledge gained from previous work, undertaken by the Department of Computer Science, and apply it to the hospice setting. The initial research proposed here will involve the use of models and technologies which have allowed us to understand, specify and assess both successful and unsuccessful collaboration, cooperation and communication in other settings, with the aim of understanding and starting to mitigate well reported problems of communication, cooperation and collaboration (i.e. social exclusion) in an internationally renowned hospice.

In the course of that activity, University of Bath and St Christopher’s Hospice will:

1. Gather the different understandings of exclusion, and desire for inclusion, held by three key groups within the hospice (patients, volunteers and central hospice staff)
2. Develop a shared understanding of at least part of that exclusion / desire for inclusion
3. Draw upon our previous work to map that common understanding to social and collaborative media tools that can be used to reduce exclusion i.e. increase the desired communication, cooperation and collaboration
4. Develop an action plan in collaboration with the hospice that will a) allow the most appropriate of those tools to be integrated into hospice practise in the short term and b) highlight areas in which further tools could usefully be extended or developed from scratch for specific use in end of life care.

The hospice will then showcase the results of this project to other end of life care providers and where applicable implement the action plan.

Importantly, however, this project will also enable us to reach a wider group of end of life care providers who are interested in our approach but are more likely to collaborate with us once we have evidence of successful impact.

This scoping project will be used as the basis for longer, wider reaching research within the large and growing end of life care sector. We envisage that research being undertaken in collaboration with hospices, nursing homes and NHS trusts and being funded by commercial nursing home providers, the NHS and/or research councils.