Together for Short Lives
Call the Helpline 0808 8088 100

Care pathways

The Together for Short Lives Series of Care Pathways focus on putting children and families at the centre of the process of planning care and support, with the aim of delivering integrated services in response to individual needs. The Together for Short Lives pathways aim to provide broad frameworks for developing more detailed and bespoke local pathways.

Children and their families will take many different journeys depending on their own needs and circumstances. We advocate a care pathway approach to delivering care and support to children and families at whatever stage of their journey – from diagnosis to end of life and into bereavement. We also have a set of self-assessment audit tools relating to each of the pathway standards to enable teams to map how their service currently performs and think about areas for development where the standards may not be fully met.

Our pathways are guided by standards at each different stage of the journey, supported by a series of goals. A Standards Framework for Children’s Palliative Care sets out the key standards that form the backbone of our four care pathways, for easy reference.