Establishing a baseline for improved neurological care with Hospice UK
The challenge
Hospice UK was launching a multi-year grant programme to help 11 hospices across England implement new interventions for people with progressive neurological conditions. An estimated 250,000 people in the UK live with these conditions, yet hospices lacked a clear understanding of their current baseline provision for this care.
Hospice UK needed a robust baseline assessment that could capture the current state of care provision, align with its Theory of Change, and create a foundation for ongoing monitoring and evaluation of impact throughout the programme.
The challenge was compounded by the diversity of participating hospices, each with a different size, catchment area, existing services and level of expertise in neurological conditions. Hospice UK needed a monitoring and evaluation approach that could accommodate this variation while still providing meaningful comparative and aggregate insights.
Our approach
We designed a comprehensive baseline evaluation that combined qualitative stakeholder insights with structured data collection across all 11 participating hospices during the summer of 2025.
We began with a series of stakeholder interviews to understand the landscape of neurological care provision. These conversations, structured around Hospice UK’s Theory of Change, helped us understand current care provision from multiple perspectives and informed the design of our data collection tools.
We then designed bespoke baseline data collection forms that captured consistent metrics across key areas, including the types of care currently available, staff confidence and knowledge levels, referral pathways and conversion rates, care quality measures, and existing relationships with neurological condition organisations. The forms were carefully structured to enable longitudinal comparison throughout the programme while remaining feasible for busy hospice teams to complete.
We conducted rigorous analysis to generate both a situational analysis of current provision and baseline metrics for future comparison. We also designed simple and effective programme monitoring tools that hospices could use for quarterly reporting throughout the programme.
This balanced approach prioritised broad stakeholder representation while developing tools that were practical to use and helpful for monitoring progress.
Results
Hospice UK gained a solid empirical foundation for measuring programme progress and demonstrating impact.
We uncovered valuable insights that helped Hospice UK understand current care provision and set realistic expectations for programme delivery. The evaluation revealed important patterns in hospice care provision, highlighting both existing strengths and opportunities for development through the programme interventions.
We also created a grounded and useful template for future programme evaluations. The methodology, data collection tools and quarterly monitoring framework we developed can be adapted for other Hospice UK programmes, providing ongoing value beyond this project.
The insights continue to support Hospice UK’s strategic work in neurological palliative care, helping it understand where targeted interventions can have the greatest impact and how to support hospices in developing confidence and competence in this complex area of care.
Client testimonial
“Kaleidoscope delivered a baseline evaluation that gave us the solid foundation we needed to monitor our programme. Their health sector expertise and well-considered questions have prompted us to think differently about our work. Kaleidoscope created an environment where we felt able to constructively challenge one another, they were kind and flexible throughout, and produced an excellent and highly readable report which we’ll use across multiple contexts. We look forward to working with the team again in the future.”
Julia Russel, Catherine Hodge and Candice Lewis, project team, Hospice UK