The Daffodil Standards for GP practices

You can register now on the RCGP website  . Once you're signed up, you'll receive a welcome pack, including a Daffodil Mark to display in your practice.

The Daffodil Standards are designed to be completed over the course of three years.

The Daffodil Standards (also known as RCGP and Marie Curie UK General Practice Core Standards for Advanced Serious Illness and End of Life Care) cover eight core areas, with tools, exercises and quality statements to get you started. These areas are:

1. Professional and competent staff
2. Early identification
3. Carer Support – before and after death
4. Seamless, planned, coordinated care
5. Assessment of unique needs of the patient
6. Quality care during the last days of life
7. Care after death
8. General Practice being hubs within Compassionate Communities

After choosing the standard you want to work on, your practice team comes together to reflect on how you're doing so far. You'll decide which criteria within your chosen standard need more work, and build up your evidence to meet the criteria.

Once you're confident you've made enough progress, you then assess yourself to see if you're meeting the criteria.

The Royal College of General Practitioners   created the Daffodil Standards in partnership with Marie Curie.

Experienced GPs and healthcare professionals helped to develop the Standards, making sure they fit into the work you're already doing, rather than adding to your workload.

The Daffodil Standards are recognised by the CQC in England as a robust framework that evidence the quality of your care.

The new five-year GP contract in England, developed by NHS England, RCGP, NICE and the Health Foundation, includes a new quality improvement approach as part of the revised Quality Outcomes Framework (QOF).

One of the two new priorities in the new QOF is end of life care and it draws very heavily on the Daffodil Standards. The Standards are referenced in the Framework.

Care homes are, and increasingly will become, a critical piece in the end of life jigsaw.

Dr Catherine Millington Sanders explains how the Daffodil Standards can support your GP practice to work with local care homes when supporting their patients at the end of life:

Why we've developed the Standard for care homes

What are the Daffodil Standards for care homes?

What do you need to do?