Everyone deserves gold standard end of life care
At The Cambridgeshire Care Home, we hold Platinum accreditation with the Gold Standards Framework — the highest status the framework awards, and one earned only through sustained excellence in palliative care across repeated independent assessment.
What is the Gold Standards Framework?
The Gold Standards Framework (GSF) is a registered charity and has been the UK’s leading training provider for generalist frontline staff in caring for people in the last years of life for over 25 years. GSF is a practical and evidence-based end of life care service improvement programme.
Our aim is to enable a ‘gold standard’ of care for everyone, with any condition, in any setting, given by any care provider, at any time in a person’s last years of life.
Since 2004, thousands of care homes have completed the programme, with hundreds receiving the GSF Quality Hallmark Award each year. For 25 years, GSF has empowered care teams to deliver proactive, personalised, and well-coordinated care, improving communication and collaboration with the primary care team, hospital and community services. This has benefitted residents by reducing unplanned hospital admissions, enabling more people to live well and die where they choose.
Why choose GSF training?
Benefits of the framework
- Proven framework for high-quality care
- Provides evidence for CQC compliance with accreditation
- Improves client outcomes and reduces unnecessary hospital admissions
- Enhances staff confidence and skills, improving staff wellbeing and job satisfaction
GSF helps drive national policy into practice
- Aligns with NICE Guidance
- Ambitions for palliative and end of life care
- Enhanced Health in Care Homes (EHCH)
With an increasing ageing population, quality end of life care is more important than ever. Knowing what truly matters most to the people we care for informs their personalised care support plan, to fulfil their wishes and preferences for the future.
— Martin Green, Chief Executive of Care England
GSF accreditation process
The GSF Accreditation Quality Hallmark Award is a nationally recognised kite-mark for excellence in care, co-badged with leading care sector organisations including Care England, the National Care Forum and the National Care Association, and serves as an information source for CQC inspections.
On completion of training, organisations can register for accreditation to receive the Quality Hallmark Award. Accreditation lasts three years, at which point a home must register again and be reassessed. Those that re-accredit every three years achieve Platinum status and can be nominated for Care Home of the Year.
Our Platinum status
The Cambridgeshire Care Home is now Platinum accredited — the highest status the Gold Standards Framework awards. Platinum is not given for a single assessment. It recognises homes that have been independently reassessed and re-accredited across successive three-year cycles, demonstrating that gold standard end of life care is embedded in daily practice rather than achieved once and left behind.
For families, that sustained record is the point. It means the care your relative receives is delivered by a team whose practice has been examined, evidenced and re-examined over years — not assessed once and assumed to hold.
The 7 key principles of the GSF
The team behind our accreditation
Platinum status is not held by a building or a policy folder. It is held by the people who apply the framework every day, and by the clinical leads who keep it embedded between assessments.
