The development of holistic dependency criteria for a specialist palliative care service

This paper offers an overview of the development of holistic dependency criteria for a specialist palliative care unit. These were developed through action research in order to respond to peaks and troughs of work load in a way that both contained staffing costs and provided high quality care. Separate criteria were developed for in-patient, day, community and lymphoedema services. These are actively used in day-to-day practice and long term planning to provide appropriate cost-efficient staffing. A broad framework has been developed for measuring dependency across clinical palliative care services. Each palliative care service would, however, need to develop its own criteria to take into account the nature of its particular patients.