Claire House Children's Hospice

Updated 11 December 2019

Claire House Children’s Hospice is operated by Claire House and opened in 1998. It is a private hospice in Bebington, Wirral. The service primarily serves the communities of Cheshire and Merseyside. It also accepts patient referrals from outside this area.

Claire House has a range of services to support children and families, both at the hospice or at home. Claire House provides planned and emergency respite for babies, children and young people. There are 10 beds split into two distinct areas for younger children and older children.

The hospice accepts referrals for symptom management and step-down care (help to leave hospital) after a long hospital admission or complex surgery.

The service provides family support and one-to-one counselling, and many of the services can be accessed as a planned day case. Other services include hydrotherapy, complementary therapy, music and play therapy.

Claire House provide end of life care at the hospice or home for both symptom management and emotional and practical support. Families can stay with their child throughout.

Claire House have two ‘butterfly bedrooms’ where a family and their child can stay after they have died, and the team assist families with emotional and practical support.

The hospital has had a registered manager in post since 2013.

In 2018-19 the service accepted 148 new referrals, and the hospice had 90% occupancy. The largest proportion of referrals were for perinatal referrals and respite care. The hospice currently has an active caseload of 288 children. The hospice have noted the complexity of children’s needs has increased over time.

We inspected this service using our comprehensive inspection methodology and the inspection was unannounced. The inspection was 8 and 9 October 2019.

We spoke to three families and viewed feedback forms from families. We looked at 10 records and observed care interactions and a pharmacy meeting.

We spoke to 15 members of staff of different levels.

Updated 11 December 2019

Claire House Children’s Hospice is operated by Claire House. Claire House has a range of services to support children and families, both at the hospice or at home. Claire House provides planned and emergency respite for babies, children and young people. There are 10 beds split into two distinct areas for younger children and older children.

The hospice accepts referrals for symptom management and step-down care (help to leave hospital) after a long hospital admission or complex surgery.

The service provides family support and one-to-one counselling, and many of the services can be accessed as a planned day case. Other services include hydrotherapy, complementary therapy, music and play therapy.

Claire House provide end of life care at the hospice or home for both symptom management and emotional and practical support. The service is underpinned by a 24 hour rapid response team of nurse specialists. Families can stay with their child throughout.

Claire House have two ‘butterfly bedrooms’ where a family and their child can stay after they have died, and the team assist families with emotional and practical support.

We inspected this service using our comprehensive inspection methodology and the inspection was unannounced. The inspection was 8 and 9 October 2019.

To get to the heart of patients’ experiences of care and treatment, we ask the same five questions of all services: are they safe, effective, caring, responsive to people's needs, and well-led? Where we have a legal duty to do so we rate services’ performance against each key question as outstanding, good, requires improvement or inadequate.

Throughout the inspection, we took account of what people told us and how the provider understood and complied with the Mental Capacity Act 2005.

Updated 11 December 2019

We rated this service as outstanding overall.

The domains of caring, responsive and well led were rated as outstanding, and the domains of safe and effective were rated as good.