Toolkit for palliative care needs in children

Palliative care for babies, children, and young people is an active and total approach to care. It begins at the point of diagnosis or recognition and continues throughout the child’s life, death, and bereavement.

We believe children’s palliative care is “everyone’s business”. This means all teams supporting a child – from GPs and school nurses to social care – play a vital role in meeting their physical, emotional, social, and spiritual needs.

This toolkit was co-developed with the support of the Association for Paediatric Palliative Medicine (APPM) and made possible thanks to funding from the True Colours Trust.

How this toolkit supports you
This evidence-informed framework helps you coordinate care through a tiered system of universal, core, and specialist services. It is structured around three main actions:

Notes for clinical use
This toolkit is a recognition tool, not a referral threshold. Decisions about referral to specialist services will always depend on local service configuration, availability, professional judgement and individual family circumstances.

Children and young people may move between categories over time, and their needs for a palliative care approach may increase, decrease or resolve depending on their clinical situation.

These categories apply across the life course, including the antenatal and perinatal period, childhood, adolescence and transition to adult services.