Dr Matthew Butler
Clinical Lead for End-of-Life Care, Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
Biography
Dr Matthew Butler is a Consultant Geriatrician at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge, where he is the Trust Clinical Lead for End of Life Care, and the Clinical Lead for Frailty at NHS Central East Integrated Care Board. His work sits at the meeting point of frailty and palliative care: he led the development of Ward T2: The Willows, an eighteen bed end of life care ward at Addenbrooke’s, and is a principal investigator of EnRICH, a geriatrician led integrated care home service whose evaluation, published in Age and Ageing in 2026, showed 23% fewer emergency admissions and 32% shorter hospital stays for care home residents. He is a co-investigator on a Marie Curie funded national study of hospital care practices in palliative and frailty care. His abiding interest is in making sure that people living and dying with frailty receive care shaped around what matters to them, wherever they happen to be.
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Dr Catriona Love
Specialty Registrar, Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
Biography
Dr Catriona Love is a final-year Specialty Registrar in Geriatric Medicine in the East of England. She played a key role in developing EnRICH (Enhanced Reviews in Care Homes), a geriatrician-led integrated service supporting residents across 14 care homes, and co-led its evaluation, published in Age and Ageing in 2026. The evaluation demonstrated 23% fewer emergency admissions, and 32% shorter hospital stays for care home residents. Her work focuses on improving communication, strengthening relationships and fostering collaboration across care boundaries, with a particular interest in how integrated models of care can improve outcomes and experiences for older people. She is passionate about developing stronger partnerships across health and social care to ensure that people's wishes and priorities remain central, particularly at the end of life.
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Session
Friday 12 March
10:20-11:20
Quays Theatre
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Symposium - Dying at home, when home is a care home: what a geriatrician-led in-reach model teaches us about science, spirit and sharing the care of the dying
Care home residents make up under 1% of the population but around 8% of emergency admissions, and their final months are too often punctuated by ambulance journeys, corridors and unfamiliar teams. This symposium pairs new science with enduring values, using one geriatrician-led care home service as a lens on how we might do better. EnRICH (Enhanced Reviews in Care Homes) delivers proactive comprehensive geriatric assessment, reactive acute review, and continuity into hospital for care home residents across Cambridge. Its controlled evaluation, published in Age and Ageing (2026), found 23% fewer emergency admissions and 32% shorter length of stay across 11 interventions versus 43 control homes, with benefits emerging over three to twelve months. Newer, unpublished analysis suggests planned as well as unplanned hospital demand fell; in-situ assessment appears to substitute for burdensome outpatient journeys. But numbers are only half the story. The session threads one resident's final year throughout, told first as it happened before in-reach, then as it happened with it, and gives voice to the care home team who lived it: on confidence, empowerment and dying in place. We then open the harder question the model raises: who owns dying in care homes, and where does specialist palliative care add most value alongside geriatric in-reach? A panel with live audience polling debates what should be replicated and what should not, with implications for the Enhanced Health in Care Homes framework, ICB commissioning and a planned qualitative follow-on study to answer some of these questions. Delegates will leave able to describe an integrated interface model and its evidence, identify where specialist palliative care expertise might fit and appraise its transferability to their own systems.
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