Are you a parent or family member providing care for a child with a life-threatening or life-limiting condition? Do you deliver or support children’s palliative care services for the under 25s? Do you want to learn new skills to help support children and young people – but can’t afford the training?

National children’s palliative care charity ACT (Association for Children’s Palliative Care) has launched (14 February 2008) a new training grants programme to help families, carers and professionals working in the field to help enhance their skills, knowledge and competencies.

The ACT Children’s Palliative Care Training Grant Programme, funded by The True Colours Trust, aims to help support best practice and specialist knowledge in caring for children with life-limiting conditions by providing small one-off grants of up to £250 to individuals and agencies who wouldn’t otherwise be able to access specialist training.

National children’s palliative care charity ACT (Association for Children’s Palliative Care) has been awarded over £350,000 to help children and young people, whose lives are shortened by complex health conditions, to prepare for the transition from children’s to adult’s palliative care services.

This three-year funding, awarded by The True Colours Trust, will enable ACT, along with partner organisations: ACH (Association of Children’s Hospices), Help the Hospices and the National Council for Palliative Care, to roll out a ‘Transition Care Pathway’ to all statutory health authority areas across the UK. It’s hoped that this Transition Care Pathway project will encourage agencies to prepare and plan for young people’s transition to adult palliative care services, lead to the development of more dedicated services for young people, and improve their experience of and their journey through the transition maze.

The ACT Transition Care Pathway project aims to help an estimated 6,000 to 10,000 young people who live with a life-limiting or life-threatening condition.

The dawn of the next stage in developing services for Bangladeshi children dying from cancer

I have just returned from one of the most powerful experiences of my nursing life, which restored my faith in my vocation as a nurse and helped me put into perspective what happens here in the UK when it comes to the delivery of children’s health care, and more importantly children’s palliative care services. It also highlighted for me the importance of an umbrella association like ACT.

No short piece like this can do any kind of justice to the poverty and suffering that I came across. This short trip was a lived experience and one which will stay with me for the rest of my life and cannot be fully put into words. Alongside this poverty and suffering there was an amazing humanity and generosity of spirit in all the people that I came across. I cannot remember seeing any acts of anger by parents, children or professionals. There was, however, a lot of frustration by the professionals at not being able to delver a service for their dying children.
 

A crucial aspect of high quality palliative care for children is acknowledged to be the academic and practice education received by all staff working within children and young people’s palliative care services. A variety of good quality educational study days and courses are currently available to qualified and non qualified staff (in health, education and social care) in different parts of the UK. However this appears to be patchy and un-coordinated and mainly organised to meet local need.

We are trying to gather evidence relating to the range and scope of the current education provision within the UK at all levels. This is in order to inform the types of learning and education that might be needed for current and future workers within the specialism.

We would like to hear from you about how your staff access training and education, and about any courses that you offer or courses attended by your staff. Please contact us, and we will send you a short questionnaire to complete and return to us. We will let you know the outcome of our findings.

Maggie Whittle and Nicola Eaton on behalf of the ACT/ACH Educational Development Group.

Dr Nicola Eaton, Director of Children’s Complex Needs and Palliative Care Research.  Tel 0117 3310893. E Mail  This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Maggie Whittle, Senior Lecturer, Children’s Nursing, Tel 0117 3288526. E Mail This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
 

 

ACT (Association for Children’s Palliative Care) is the only organisation working across the UK to achieve a better quality of life and care for every life-limited child and their family. 

Becoming a member of ACT is free to families, and you will receive an Information Pack and the ACT 4 families newsletter five times a year, packed with the latest information and news about children’s palliative care.  By joining ACT you will also help us when we campaign for improvements to children's palliative care - the more members we have, the stronger our voice.

You can download the December 2007 edition of ACT 4 Families here.

Join ACT now by filling in a short Family Membership form.