Case study - Meet Tim

It is important for you to consider that in the last year of life, whilst acknowledging symptoms may be disease specific, overall the problems and challenges that patients and carers experience will be similar and can be broadly described in the four domains:

• physical, pain and symptom control

• psychological, how is this patient/family coping

• social, what is the support network/what is the environment

• spiritual, finding meaning - which can include finding if there are cultural and religious considerations.

It is recommended to use this core framework as the basis for every assessment.

To learn more about the complexity of end of life care, we would like to take you through a series of conversations around one individual’s experience of end of life care, some of these are good examples and others are poor examples.