Commissioning pack

On this page you will find a pack of documents to help our member hospices, local commissioners, national health bodies and government departments with the planning, commissioning, and contracting of palliative and end of life care services for their populations from the independent hospice sector.

About the commissioning pack

We have compiled this commissioning pack on the request of our member hospices as well as local and national commissioners. It consists of four parts:

Commissioning independent hospices guide
Hospice service models: a practical guide to the principles and resourcing of care for adults and children
Safe and effective staffing for palliative care inpatient services: an improvement resource (to be published in autumn 2025).
Hospice costing model toolkit (to be published later in 2025).

These resources draw on nationally published evidence for population planning, the efficacy of palliative care and measuring outcomes.

We have worked with our members to standardise a way of describing hospice care services and develop toolkits to support consistent methodologies of staffing and costing these services.

Aims

Our sector is diverse, flexible and innovative and we have shared best practice examples for others to learn from.

Hospice funding comes from voluntary fundraising and statutory commissioning. The aim of the commissioning pack is to assist fair and consistent statutory funding so that all populations have equitable access to quality hospice care wherever they live.

Intended for hospice providers and commissioners, this publication describes service models operating according to escalations in acuity and urgency within hospice care provision for adults and children across the UK It seeks to identify and detail the elements of service approaches based upon five underlying principles and the core components of those services, whilst also describing the populations served and staffing skill mixes required.

Download the guide

Other useful resources

Hospice services should be commissioned alongside other health and care services and to meet local population need.

Through our population needs assessment tool, you can access bespoke national demographic and health data to assist with service planning and design.

We also collate hospice service activity, patient demographics and hospice workforce data on an annual basis to help monitor local outcomes and demonstrate the reach and trends in the sector.