Consultant in Palliative Medicine

Job summary

The Hospice of St Francis, based in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire is offering an exciting opportunity for a Consultant to join our motivated, skilled and dynamic team in providing inpatient, outpatient and community palliative care to patients with life limiting illnesses. This Consultant role would be particularly suitable for a newly qualified Consultant wanting to start their careers in a supportive environment.

The post will be based at the Hospice of St Francis and the post holder will carry responsibility for the delivery of excellent palliative and end of life care across inpatient and community settings working with our team of highly skilled doctors and nurse specialists. The Hospice of St Francis has a 12 bedded inpatient unit, a thriving health and wellbeing outpatient service (the Spring Centre) and an experienced community nursing team. We are committed to providing first class palliative care to all who need it wherever they are. We achieve this by direct delivery of care, by delivering an extensive teaching programme and by working closely with hospital and primary care teams. Our team has particular interests in the palliative care of end stage respiratory and heart disease as well as cancer and would like to extend our role in supporting the care of the frail elderly. This post represents an opportunity to practise palliative medicine based in a purpose built building in beautiful surroundings in the countryside of West Hertfordshire.

Main duties of the job

For a detailed description of the role, please see attached Job Description that has been kitemarked by the Royal College of Physicians.

The main responsibilities of the job will be to support and lead the multi-disciplinary team in delivering excellent care to our patients and families where ever they are.

Also to play a key role in the teaching programme that we offer internally but also to seek opportunities to deliver teaching to other healthcare professionals both locally and nationally.

We are keen to develop new services to achieve our strategic objective of reaching more people and will be looking towards the successful applicant to move this work forward.

About us

The Hospice is a registered charity receiving around 16% of its funding from the NHS. We rely on the generosity of our local community to fund the remaining 84% of our costs. This comes from many individuals, local businesses, trusts, schools, community groups, our shops, our lottery and gifts in wills.

The role of Hospices is changing. We are working in a rapidly changing care context with increasing demand, changing demography and pressure on all services, health and social care and are constantly reviewing our service in order to meet the changing needs of the population and the local healthcare system.

The Commission into the Future of Hospice Care challenges hospices to step up into a new world of early intervention, innovative ways to support people along their whole trajectory of care, and new ways to respond in a crisis. The Commission proposes that hospices need to integrate not just with other health and social care organisations but with the community itself, to identify new ways of addressing unmet need in a relevant way. However, the public perception is that hospices are still about beds and care in the last weeks of life. So there is much to do.

The Hospice is well placed to step up to this new agenda and has made many steps in the past five years to extend its reach and become relevant to more people. The focus on compassionate whole person care will remain our focus.