Eligibility Criteria

Who Is Eligible?

The catchment area for referrals to Kirkwood Hospice is the Kirklees Metropolitan District Council area. Referrals from other areas will be considered if the patient has specifically requested to come to Kirkwood Hospice, for example, if their family lives within Kirklees.

People with active, progressive and advanced diseases are eligible for hospice services. This includes diseases such as cancer, heart disease, neurological diseases and lung disease as well as other life-threatening illness, from which a patient will not recover.

Hospice services include community support, in-patient care, family care, counselling and bereavement services, complementary therapies, drop-in and out-patient services.

 

Eligibility Criteria for Specialist Palliative Care (SPC) Services

Common eligibility criteria were agreed in 2000 by all providers of SPC working in Calderdale and Kirklees in order to ensure equity of access. These criteria reflect those adopted by other SPC services across the country.

There are three elements to the common eligibility criteria:

  • Patients should have active, progressive and potentially life-threatening illness
  • Patients should have unresolved, complex needs that cannot be met by the current caring team, or it is anticipated that the patient will develop such needs in the near future. These needs may be psychological, social, spiritual or physical
  • Patients must have been recently assessed by a member of a SPC team

Admission Criteria

  • The patient will need to have been assessed and referred to the Hospice by a member of one of the specialist palliative care teams, by their general practitioner or their hospital consultant
  • It should be noted that where a patient has documented or stated that their "Preferred Place of Death" is the Hospice, in the absence of an unmet specialist palliative care need, "Preferred Place of Death" in isolation would not meet the criteria required for a Hospice admission
  • Requests for urgent admissions out-of-hours will be dealt with according to Kirkwood's In-Patient Unit Operational policy