NHS: End-of-life Care

Baroness Merron Excerpts

Thursday 8th September 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kamall (Con)]

The noble Baroness will be aware that earlier in the week, when we had the debate on integrated care boards and their responsibilities, we added—thanks to the work, once again, of the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay—palliative care services to the list of services that integrated care boards must commission. Integrated care boards will be accountable to NHS England, but also the CQC will be doing a lot of evaluation and they will be measured against the list of services that they have to commission. Clearly, there will have to be accountability on palliative care services.

[Baroness Merron (Lab)]

My Lords, when a child is at the end of their life, quality palliative care should ensure, of course, both the child’s comfort and managing pain and symptoms, but also provide support and care for the entire family. These are clearly heartbreaking situations for everybody involved, so will the Minister assure your Lordships’ House that the review will take account of the support that is given to the whole staff team, including ancillary workers? They, of course, have a key role to play.

[Lord Kamall (Con)]

One thing that often happens at reviews is that we realise how complicated these issues are. One often cannot pinpoint one key issue, or one silver bullet, as it were. Therefore, quite often—and I was on a call on a different issue yesterday—we thought we had to tackle certain issues but realised there were wider systemic issues. Clearly, that is going to be the case here. NHS England’s palliative and end-of-life care programme is an all-age programme, but there are specific pieces of work focused on children and young people. We have also been working very sympathetically with charities such as Together for Short Lives. It has been commissioned to produce written guidance to provide ICBs and ICSs more detail, as the noble Baroness asked for, but also to make sure we make it a better environment and learn.