Lifetime Service

Lifetime Service

This service is provided by Sirona and covers Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire.

The Lifetime service is for families where a child has a life threatening, life limiting condition (not including malignant conditions).

The Lifetime Service includes the following services:

• Community Children’s Nursing Service
• Continuing Care Team
• Psychology Service

The Lifetime Community Children’s Nursing Team (CCN Team) is a team of community children’s nurses who manage and co-ordinate the clinical care of all the patients on the Lifetime caseload. Regular interventions are provided to prevent inappropriate visits to the Emergency Department, unnecessary hospital admissions and to increase management of care within the community. Core CCNs are the keyworkers and/or lead professionals that work closely with a child or young person, their family, and wider multiagency team.

The CCN Team also provide a Nursing Service to any child or young person in North Somerset with an acute, specific nursing need e.g. medication administered via injection or wound care.

The Lifetime Continuing Care Team (CCT) provide specialist support for families with a child with complex health needs, at home, through a care package funded by the Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) across BNSSG. The team is made up of Community Children’s Nurses and Lifetime Support workers.

The Lifetime Psychology Service provide a specialist clinical psychology service to children, young people, and their families within the Lifetime Service. They provide support to both the CCT and Core service. This encompasses direct work around difficulties such as adjustment; managing difficult procedures and preparing for hospital admissions; managing psychological difficulties such as anxiety, trauma, depression or other difficult thoughts, feelings and behaviours related to the life-limiting or life-threatening condition; supporting communication between families and medical teams. They also provide a psychology service to the Paediatric Cystic Fibrosis team at Royal United Hospital, Bath.

All the Lifetime Services work closely with the multi-professional teams, including the team in the hospitals as well as teams in the community, to support the families we care for. Our main aim is to keep children at home safely and maintain the highest quality of life within the community. 

Children who meet the Lifetime Community Nursing Service Criteria will have an assessment of their healthcare needs and a plan of care made with the child and family to meet these needs. This care plan can support eligibility for a care package, enable respite services to support families in the community and allow children with complex needs access education.

Please see the website for more details

Referral Guidance

Refer using the Lifetime proforma and email to: Sirch.Lifetime@nhs.net

Referrals can be made by parents / carers as well as professionals.

Referrals for the Community Nursing Service : Children, within BNSSG, with any life limiting or life threatening condition where the child is not expected to live beyond 40 years of age (apart from children who have cystic fibrosis or cancer as they have their own specialist teams based at Bristol Children’s Hospital). Within North Somerset, a referral can also be made for children who have an acute, specific nursing need e.g. short intravenous antibiotics or wound care.

Referral for to the Continuing Care Team: Children with long term invasive ventilation needs (via tracheostomy); children who are assessed to require additional, on-going health care support provided by a care package (as assessed by the National Framework 2010).

Referral for the Clinical Psychology Team: Referrals to Psychology cannot be made unless a child is receiving a service from the Lifetime nursing team. Referrals can be made via the Lifetime named nurse or via self-referral for families on the Lifetime caseload

Contact the service at:

Corum 1, Corum Office Park Crown Way, Warmley BS30 8FJ 

Tel: 0300 124 5916

Efforts are made to ensure the accuracy and agreement of these guidelines, including any content uploaded, referred to or linked to from the system. However, BNSSG ICB cannot guarantee this. This guidance does not override the individual responsibility of healthcare professionals to make decisions appropriate to the circumstances of the individual patient, in consultation with the patient and/or guardian or carer, in accordance with the mental capacity act, and informed by the summary of product characteristics of any drugs they are considering. Practitioners are required to perform their duties in accordance with the law and their regulators and nothing in this guidance should be interpreted in a way that would be inconsistent with compliance with those duties.

Information provided through Remedy is continually updated so please be aware any printed copies may quickly become out of date.