Identifying clients of concern

Activity worksheet: Identifying clients of concern

This activity sheet aims to help you gather your thoughts in identifying clients potentially approaching the end of life, and when exploring concerns with health and social care professionals. It can be completed at different times to reflect the changing needs in a clients’ health.

Health monitoring tool

This tool aims to help you keep track of any changes in the health of clients, and events related to their healthcare. Complete a new form for each client you are concerned about. This tool could be used in multidisciplinary meetings, to help the multidisciplinary team monitor a client’s health and to plan their future care.

The Liver Map

The liver map can help you identify signs, symptoms and behaviours of alcohol related liver disease. It assumes three stages, and helps you to think about how best to respond to clients with this disease. Initiating conversations about palliative and end of life care are emphasised at the stage where a client has been diagnosed with decompensated liver disease.

The SPICT-4 all tool.

The Supportive and Palliative Care Indicator tool for all (SPICT-4ALL) provides more detailed information about the signs and symptoms that indicate a clients overall health may be declining. With non-medical people in mind, it aims to ensure signs are recognised and talked about early so that better coordinated care and support is received, wherever a person may be living.

Supporting client’s palliative and end of life care needs

Activity worksheet: Exploring the benefits of palliative care input

Consider using this worksheet any time you have concerns about a client who you feel may benefit from palliative care. This activity sheet aims to help you to explore – with a client’s key health and social care professionals – the benefits of earlier palliative care input.

Planning care at home checklist

Using key areas of assessment, this tool will help you to consider what support is already in place, and what else might be needed when planning care for clients in a project.

Client of concern project checklist

This checklist could be helpful in planning care for clients about whose health you are concerned.

“Who can support you” tool

This tool could help you identify sources of support in your local area for you and your clients

The Ecomap tool

Completing an Ecomap with a client can help you explore who is important to them. It can also be an opportunity to open up conversations with clients about what really matters to them.

Shared care

Activity worksheet: Multi-agency working

This worksheet aims to help you think about the role of multi-agency working when it comes to supporting clients with deteriorating health. Consider this worksheet any time you are supporting a client with advanced ill health, or as a team exercise when working with multiple clients, to explore the more general challenges your project or service is facing, and what actions could help in overcoming them.

Multi-agency meeting prompt tool

This tool could be helpful when planning multi-agency meetings and for recording any actions that arise.

“Who can support you” tool

This tool outlines potential sources of supports for clients with poor health, and for you and your team.

WISE map

The core aims and values of a multi-agency team

The multi-agency response map (WISE) can be a useful tool for exploring with others what the core aims and values of a multi-agency response need to be in order to meet the needs of clients whose health you are concerned about.

Communicating about what matters to clients

Activity worksheet: Initiating difficult conversations with clients

This worksheet aims to help you plan ahead for conversations you may have with clients, particularly the more difficult ones. It may not take you long, but gathering your thoughts and writing them down will help you to gain some perspective, and inform how you would like to proceed.

“Support and concerns mapping” toolkit

This mapping toolkit can be a useful tool for exploring aspects of a client’s life, and what really matters to them at the time. It enables clients to  determine the pace of every conversation, and what they want to talk about.

“Questions to consider” tool

This tool can give you some ideas about the kind of questions you may want to discuss with clients. This could be helpful to look at while planning conversations with a client or before using the “support and concerns mapping” tool.

The enabling communication pre planner factsheet

This factsheet provides a summary of things to support the conversations you have with clients. It can be a helpful prompt when planning for a conversation with a client about their support needs, and what matters to them.

Bereavement

Activity worksheet: Bereavement support

This worksheet aims to help you think about how best to respond to the impact a death will have within your project or service, and how best to support yourself, the team and clients. Consider this activity as a team exercise, and one that can inform the policies and procedures following a death in your service or project.

Religious practices around death and dying

This graph illustrates the rituals and practices of the main faiths, from when death approaches through to funeral customs and mourning practices

Flowchart after a client has died

This diagram aims to outline what needs to happen in the project following the death of a client. It can help you when thinking about the order in which the more practical things need to occur, and inform any policies and procedures in place.

Comprehensive guide to arranging a funeral

Developed by Quaker Social Action, this is a simple and practical guide to planing an affordable and meaningful funeral. It can be helpful to next of kin or family members of clients who have died if asking you for advice and support.

Self care

Stress reactivity tool

The stress reactivity tool can help us understand more about how we personally arrive at our own emotionally charged reactions, such as feeling overwhelmed or overtired. It provides an opportunity to explore those reactions that create the most stress for us and consider alternative ways of responding to stressful situations and events. The work examples will help you.

Self-care toolkit

This toolkit can help you identify signs and symptoms that indicate you might be close to stress overload. Using it you can explore helpful and unhelpful strategies for coping with stress, and consider a self-care plan that is realistic and achievable.

Breathing Space practice

Creating spaces in the day to stop and observe what is going on in the present moment has been shown to be enormously helpful in mitigating the negative effects of stress. STOP is one of many practices to weave into our day that enables us to pause and notice what is going on in that moment in time for us, and help us consider alternative ways of responding, particularly if experiencing difficult thoughts, emotions, situations or events, (such as feeling angry, self-critical, or worrying about a client).