Live-in Care in Sydenham

Live-in care at the end of life, near St Christopher's

St Christopher's Hospice on Lawrie Park Road is where Dame Cicely Saunders opened what is widely recognised as the first modern hospice in 1967, and it supports most of its patients at home. Its community team or the district nurses may already be visiting.

Those teams visit; they do not stay. What a family can lack is someone in the house the rest of the time: to help with washing and turning, offer drinks, notice when pain is returning, and ring the hospice team or the nurse. A live-in carer can be that person, under the plan the clinical team sets. We are independent of St Christopher's, with no formal arrangement, but our carers work alongside whichever team is involved, and we agree at the start who does what. See our palliative care page for more.

Call us early. We will not promise a start date we cannot staff, and end-of-life care is better planned than rushed.

Does NHS Continuing Healthcare pay for live-in care in Sydenham?

It can. The NHS guide to NHS continuing healthcare says this NHS-funded care can be provided in a person's own home, and that if someone needs care urgently, for example because they are terminally ill, the assessment may be fast-tracked. For Sydenham, NHS South East London Integrated Care Board makes the decision. If the person is deteriorating quickly, ask the GP, hospice team or ward about a fast-track assessment. Where CHC is awarded, the ICB decides how the care is arranged, so tell them if you want a live-in carer. If CHC is not awarded, Lewisham Council may still contribute after a needs and financial assessment; our Lewisham live-in care page sets out how. Otherwise we give a written quote after our free assessment.

Up the hill or down: room for a carer and for equipment

The carer needs a private room. End-of-life care often brings equipment too: a profiling bed, a pressure mattress, sometimes a hoist.

• Upper Sydenham, towards Crystal Palace, has large Victorian and Edwardian villas. A whole house usually has a room for the carer, and a ground-floor front room can take a hospital bed so the person need not climb the stairs again. Plenty of them have been divided up, though, and an upper-floor flat with no lift makes a bed or hoist delivery difficult.
• Lower Sydenham and the area towards Bell Green have interwar houses, typically two storeys, on flatter streets. These suit live-in care well: a spare room for the carer and an easier route for a wheelchair.
• Post-war council flats work when there are two bedrooms and a lift that is reliable.

With only one bedroom, visiting care is the option to look at; see home care in Sydenham.

When the carer changes over

Live-in carers work in rotations, and a handover matters most when someone is very ill. We introduce the incoming carer and go through the care plan, medication and any instructions from the hospice or nurses.

Sydenham station has London Overground Windrush line trains and Southern services to London Bridge, and Lower Sydenham, on the Bromley border, has Southeastern Hayes line trains through Catford Bridge and Lewisham. Lewisham's published list of controlled parking zones has no Sydenham zone, so on most Lewisham streets in SE26 a carer arriving by car can park without a permit, subject to the yellow lines and bays on the road. Streets on the Bromley or Southwark side of the boundary follow their own council's rules.

A husband or wife who needs looking after too

When one partner is seriously ill at home in SE26, the other is often the first to run out of strength, particularly with health problems of their own. A live-in carer takes the personal care, meals and shopping off them, and gives the other partner a hand on the stairs, so that the time left together is not spent on tasks. St Christopher's lists its own support for carers on its website, which a family can use alongside ours. One carer for two people is costed after we have met both of them.

The carer's daily break in Sydenham

The carer has a protected break each day, covered by a relative or a relief carer if the person cannot be left. Places nearby:

• Sydenham Wells Park off Wells Park Road, with formal gardens, water features and a sensory garden planted to stimulate all five senses. With a carer pushing, it can also be a quiet outing for someone in a wheelchair.
• Mayow Park, the borough's oldest municipal park, which has a café.
• Sydenham Library on Sydenham Road, hosted for the council by Calico Libraries (closed on Sundays), and the shops and cafés of Sydenham Road and Kirkdale.

For how rotations, breaks and holiday cover work, see live-in care in London.

What we can help with in Sydenham

• A carer living in, with their own room
• Care for one person or a couple
• Personal care through the day
• Medication support
• Cooking, housekeeping and laundry
• Dementia support at home
• Company, outings and appointments
• Cover arranged for the carer's breaks