Hospices: Funding

Baroness Wheeler Excerpts

Thursday 24th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord McColl of Dulwich (Con)]

My Lords, I, too, thank my noble friend Lord Farmer for initiating this important debate. For most of my professional life, I have been associated with hospices such as St Christopher’s, the Mildmay in the East End of London, the Mildmay in Uganda and the Phyllis Tuckwell Hospice in Surrey. I have learned a lot working in these places.

I remember, for instance, a lady of 28 with an inoperable cancer of the throat. She was in pain and a lot of respiratory distress and needed relief from these symptoms. I explained to her that I could put a needle into her vein and titrate her with analgesics until all her symptoms had gone. She agreed to this. I gave her a surprisingly large dose of heroin, which not only did not kill her but relieved all her symptoms and gave her three weeks of symptom-free life. During that time, she was able with a clear mind to say goodbye to her friends and to tidy up all those loose ends. Some people accused me of hypocrisy, saying, “You’re really killing them and just saying that you’re relieving their pain”. Well, anyone who thinks they know what is in my mind has delusions of grandeur.

Cicely Saunders and I were contemporaries as medical students. Her work on relieving symptoms in hospices was very important indeed. She established without any doubt that the right way was to keep a constant level of analgesia in the blood rather than give patients doses only when they had the pain. If you do this, you require less of the analgesics overall and so the patients are more awake and able to enjoy life. That was a very important contribution. The present laws against euthanasia and assisted dying are like a huge dam preventing great enthusiasm for euthanasia and assisted dying. That dam can sometimes develop a crack for those who want to legalise euthanasia. Once you have a little crack in the dam, the whole thing can give way. Cicely Saunders’s work was an extremely important aspect of this.

As far as the funding of hospices is concerned—

[Baroness Wheeler (Lab)]

Can the noble Lord wind up, please? His three minutes are over.

[Lord McColl of Dulwich (Con)]

There is an urgent need for more funding, as has been said many times, and a partnership between government, charities and local authorities is required.