Criteria:

1. The service is available to people living within the catchment area who have incurable, life-limiting malignant or non-malignant disease.
2. The patients have usually reached the end or are close to reaching the end of active treatment and have complex problems associated with their disease, such as difficult physical symptoms and/or psychological, social or spiritual issues.
3. The patients (or their advocate) and the patients’ GP must consent to the referral.

Download the St Peter's Hospice referral form here

How to Make a Referral:

1. A request for assessment can be made by any professional, but it must be made with the consent of both the patient (or their advocate) and their GP.
2. Referrals should always be accompanied by a fully completed referral form (available above) and must include copies of recent hospital letters, scans and blood results and any other relevant information. Insufficient information will delay the initial assessment.
3. The patient can be referred for the following services:
Home Visit Community Nurse Specialist
For the majority of patients at home, the initial holistic assessment will be made by the community nurse specialists. If a joint visit with GP and/or DN would be helpful, please indicate on the referral form.
Home Visit Doctor/Outpatient appointment

If a patient has particularly complex medical problems a senior doctor can make the initial assessment either at the patients’ home or as an outpatient at the hospice.

Day Hospice
A patient can be referred for attendance at Day Hospice for a defined period of time to address physical and/or psychological needs.
The patients attend for one day each week and a range of activities and complementary therapies are available. It is possible for patients to have a review by any member of the multidisciplinary team as necessary. The patients are reviewed at regular intervals and are discharged at the point where the team agrees that the patients needs have been addressed.
Patients can be also be referred for an eight week Fatigue Management programme run by the physiotherapy and occupational therapy team within Day Hospice. For more information on this programme click here.

If the patient is using oxygen, a HOOF will need to be completed by the GP to ensure oxygen is delivered to St Peter’s for use by the patient on their day of attendance at the Day Hospice.

Inpatient Unit 

The hospice inpatient beds at Knowle and Brentry are used to offer short-term admission (usually up to 14 days), with the aim of supporting patients at times of acute and/or complex specialist palliative care needs. For patients with acute reversible conditions requiring urgent investigation or intensive medical management, hospital admission should be considered, depending on the informed choice of the patient or patients advocate. 
If a GP/DN/hospital palliative care team would like a current patient to be considered for admission they should contact the patient’s Hospice Community Nurse Specialist or Day Hospice team to request this. If the patient concerned is not already known to the hospice it is essential to fax a full referral form to the relevant unit and discuss the case with one of the senior doctors. Routine requests for admission will be discussed at the next admission meeting (Daily: Monday to Friday). Emergency admissions can be arranged for the same day or out of hours if appropriate, depending on bed availability. Requests for urgent admission must be discussed with a senior hospice doctor who is available 24 hours for urgent advice.
For planned admissions if patients are using oxygen, a HOOF will need to be completed by the GP or referring hospital team to ensure oxygen is delivered to St Peter’s for use by the patient during their inpatient stay.

Click here to read our guideline for arranging admission

Hospice at Home
This is a service available to enable patients with high levels of nursing need to be in their own home for terminal care. It is intended for patients in the last week of life. A nurse from St Peter’s stays with the patient for a full eight hour shift, providing up to 24 hour cover if required. There is limited availability for this service, which means that provision is usually limited to one patient at any one time. There is a separate referral form to access this service. Please complete the form here and fax it to the medical secretary. The community team leader or the hospice CNS on call will contact the referrer to discuss whether Hospice at Home is available/appropriate for the patient.

- Bereavement/FLAGS
The hospice offers both an adult bereavement service and bereavement support for children and young people up to the age of 18yrs, and these services are run by the Social Work Department.
The Adult Bereavement Care Service offers support to adults in the form of both individual and group support. Priority is given to the families and carers of patients who were known to St Peter’s Hospice and internal referrals are made by the staff who have had closest contact with the family concerned. This service can occasionally extend support to external referrals (the death must have occurred through incurable illness) – and external referrals must be sent in writing to the Head of the Social Work Department, using a  Bereavement Care Service Assessment form which you can download here.

F.L.A.G.S. (Family Liaison and Grief Support) – is our service which offers pre-grief and post-bereavement support to children and young people have someone in their family who has a serious and life limiting illness. F.L.A.G.S. can work with families where there are complex needs.  Individual and group work is available for children and a monthly support group is run for bereaved parents. The process for referring children, young people and their families is using forms F.L.1. (Pre-grief support) and F.L.2.(Post bereavement support) which you can download here. External and direct referrals will be considered for this service, but referrals for children of patients known to the hospice will be prioritized over external referrals.

It is not possible to make a direct referral for occupational therapy, physiotherapy, chaplaincy, psychologist or respite admission.

4. Referral forms should indicate whether referral for home visit or admission is routine (contact by hospice team within 2 weeks) or urgent (contact within 48 hours). Urgent cases are those with severe physical symptoms or severe psychological problems or those who are rapidly entering the terminal phase.

5. It is important that the referrer identifies the reason for referral and current problems requiring specialist palliative care input.

6 If the patient no longer requires input from the hospice they will be discharged. If there is a need for further input at a later date then an updated referral form will be required.

Completed referral forms 

Once you have completed your referral form you can fax it to:

North Bristol team : 0117 915 9473

South and East Bristol Team : 0117 915 9262

Or email it to This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it  with any appropriate attachments

Or you can post the completed form to us at

Medical Secretary
St Peter's Hospice
St Agnes Avenue
Knowle
Bristol
BS4 2DU

If you have any queries relating to referrals please telephone 0117 915 9225 and ask for the Medical Secretary, who can also arrange for a referral form to be posted to you.