Children’s Palliative Care training
This training prepares you to provide skilled, compassionate care to children and young people with life-limiting conditions and their families in our children's hospice. You will learn how to support the whole family through living, dying and bereavement, combining clinical excellence with play, joy and ordinary childhood. This is the foundation of everything we do here.
What This Training Covers
A clear, practical grounding in children’s palliative care.
This training prepares you to provide skilled, compassionate care to children and young people with life-limiting conditions and their families in our children's hospice. You will learn how to support the whole family through living, dying and bereavement, combining clinical excellence with play, joy and ordinary childhood. This is the foundation of everything we do here.
Learning Outcomes
By the end, your staff will be able to:
What Your Team Will Learn
A closer look at the children’s palliative care module.
The module is built in short, practical sections. Each one teaches a part of the topic, then applies it to a real care scenario and checks understanding before moving on.
Understanding Children's Palliative Care
Children's palliative care is genuinely different from adult palliative care, not just a smaller version of it. Many children live with their conditions for years, so our care is as much about helping them have a full childhood with play, education, friendships and fun as it is about end of life. We care for the whole family, including well siblings and grandparents. Our hospice is far more often a place for living than a place for dying, with most of our contact through short breaks and respite.
The Four Categories of Life-Limiting Conditions
We work with children across four broad categories of life-limiting and life-threatening conditions. Category 1 includes conditions where curative treatment may be possible but can fail, like cancer. Category 2 includes conditions requiring intensive long-term treatment to prolong life, like cystic fibrosis or severe heart conditions. Category 3 includes progressive conditions without curative options, like muscular dystrophy or metabolic diseases. Category 4 includes severe, non-progressive conditions causing extreme vulnerability and complications, like severe cerebral palsy. Understanding these categories helps us plan appropriate care and support.
Family-Centred Care and Supporting Siblings
We provide care to the whole family, not just the child with the life-limiting condition. Parents are partners in care and usually the real experts in their child's needs. Well siblings are deeply affected by their brother or sister's illness and need their own support, space and groups where they can be children without the weight of caring. Grandparents and the wider family are also part of our care. We build deep, trusting relationships over many years, getting to know each child as a whole person, not just a diagnosis.
Honest and Age-Appropriate Communication
We communicate honestly with children and families in ways suited to the child's age and understanding. This includes the immensely difficult work of talking with children about dying when appropriate. We never lie to children, but we tailor our words to what they can understand and what they are asking. We support families through unbearable conversations and help them find the right words. Children often know more than adults think they do, and honest communication builds trust and reduces fear.
Symptom Management in Children
We manage symptoms like pain, seizures, breathlessness, secretions and feeding difficulties with care tailored to children. Medicines must be given at doses appropriate to a child's age and weight, never adult doses. We use comfort measures, positioning, distraction and play alongside clinical interventions. Pain assessment in children who cannot speak requires careful observation of behaviour, facial expression, body tension and changes in their usual pattern. We work closely with our medical team and follow each child's individual care plan.
Short Breaks and the Joy of Childhood
Short breaks and respite are a central part of our work. We provide skilled clinical care and genuine fun in the same breath, making the most of our hydrotherapy pool, sensory rooms, music, art, play and trips. We help children have ordinary childhood pleasures while managing complex symptoms, medicines, feeding, seizures and breathing with confidence. These stays give exhausted parents precious rest and build deep relationships with families over many years. Every short break is about living well.
Advance Care Planning and Parallel Planning
Advance care planning helps families prepare for possible deterioration and death while still hoping for every good day. This is called parallel planning, hoping for the best while preparing for the worst. We support families to create emergency care plans and advance care plans that record the child's and family's wishes, preferred place of care, and what matters most to them. These plans are shared with hospitals, community teams and ambulance services. Planning ahead reduces crisis decisions and helps families feel more in control.
Care at End of Life and After Death
When a child is dying, we provide gentle, skilled care focused on comfort, dignity and family time. After death, we offer our cool bedroom so families can keep their child with them for precious unhurried days. We support memory making including handprints, locks of hair, photographs and memory boxes that families treasure forever. We care for the child's body with deep respect. Cultural, spiritual and religious needs guide everything we do. There is no rush. Families lead and we follow.
Long-Term Bereavement Support
Our bereavement care does not end when a child dies. We support the whole family for as long as they need it, through home visits, sibling support groups, remembrance events and marking anniversaries. Grief for a child is lifelong and families often return to us months or years later. We hold families in our hearts forever. Sibling bereavement support is especially important as brothers and sisters carry their grief into adulthood.
Safeguarding and Staff Support
Safeguarding children runs through everything we do. We follow the Children Acts and working together to safeguard children guidance. Any concern about a child's safety must be reported immediately to our named safeguarding leads. We also recognise that caring for dying children carries immense emotional weight. We support each other through reflective practice, debriefs after a child's death, supervision and attention to our own well-being and resilience. It is vital to talk about how this work affects you and to seek support when you need it.
Key Points Covered
The things your team must remember.
- Children's palliative care is about the whole childhood journey over many years, not just end of life, and our hospice is a place for living and joy as much as for dying.
- We care for the whole family including well siblings and grandparents, building deep relationships and recognising parents as partners and experts in their child's needs.
- Honest, age-appropriate communication with children and families builds trust, and children often know more than we think they do.
- Symptom management in children requires careful observation, especially for those who cannot speak, and medicines must always be at doses appropriate to the child.
- Short breaks combine skilled clinical care with play, fun and ordinary childhood, and bereavement support continues for as long as families need it.
- Safeguarding is paramount, staff support and reflective practice are essential, and we must care for our own well-being to sustain this deeply emotional work.
Who and how often
Children’s Palliative Care is refreshed every year, for the staff in your care setting whose roles require it.
CQC and standards
Supports the training evidence CQC expects to see for a well-run, safe care setting.
How CareStream Delivers It
Not a slideshow once a year. Training that sticks.
CareStream delivers children’s palliative care training in the hub your team already uses, grounded in best practice and your own policies, so it fits your care setting and not a generic template.
Teach, then assess
Short teaching sections and a real care scenario, then an assessment that checks understanding.
In any language
Staff complete it in over 60 languages, while your records stay in English.
Learn and retry
A wrong answer triggers a short follow-up lesson and a fresh question, so the gap is closed.
Renewals handled
Automatic reminders at 90, 30 and 7 days, with a live compliance dashboard.
FAQs
Frequently asked questions.
Give your team children’s palliative care training that actually sticks.
See how CareStream delivers your mandatory training in the hub, in any language.