Hospices: Funding

Baroness Pitkeathley Excerpts

Thursday 24th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Pitkeathley (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, for securing this debate and for his excellent speech reminding us of the philosophical basis of hospices. My remarks are focused more on the practical.

In the past six months, I have visited two friends who were in hospices as their lives came to an end. Both were being cared for in the way we would all like in similar circumstances—with skill and compassion and with support for them and their families. However, in both cases the hospices were operating only at half-pace. Each had 50% of its beds unoccupied for lack of money. It was also a source of regret to the staff that they had not only had to close beds but to curtail the outreach services which are so vital to patients and their families—proof, if any were needed, of the crisis in funding faced by hospices. Emergency funding is needed now to supplement the extraordinary fundraising effort volunteers and support groups put in, but this is a short-term solution. In no other area of health would we tolerate such dependence on charitable activity.

Hospices need to be incorporated into the NHS and dying needs to be seen as as much a part of life as being born. This does not negate in any way the voluntary principle on which hospices were founded—I had the privilege of meeting Dame Cicely Saunders and talking to her in the early days of the movement—but builds on it, harnessing that support and good will and enabling anyone who is need of a hospice place, or indeed hospice services in their own home, to access them. I hope that the assisted dying debate, as it proceeds, will highlight the need for more and better palliative care. Of course, hospices are not the only places providing such care, but many of them have expertise and experience from which the whole of the NHS could learn, and I hope that this learning will be encouraged by the Government. That expertise goes beyond the specialist medical care to manage pain and other symptoms over the short stays or those of longer duration with which we are familiar. It also includes research and innovation to improve palliative care services wherever they are provided.

We should not forget hospices’ important links with their local community, for which they are famed. They mobilise volunteers and voluntary efforts so that local communities are familiar with their services and able to access them, for the benefit of patients and their families when their own time comes. Many a bereaved person has been helped to recover from their grief by, in turn, becoming interested and involved in volunteering at a hospice—a two-way street, indeed.