Hospice Funding

Bell Ribeiro-Addy Excerpts

Monday 22nd April 2024 Commons Chamber

[Sally-Ann Hart]

I agree. It is important to point out that most hospices do not want 100% funding from the Government because they need the flexibility to do what they want. Fundraising is a really important part of the local community effort, bringing people together, but when the dependence on fundraising is so vast we might need to intervene to provide extra funding.

End of life care is an essential service that so many of us will need, but the situation is made worse by inflationary pressures and rising demand. We have an excellent ICB in Sussex—NHS Sussex, led by Adam Doyle—which has highlighted that hospices are recognised as having become increasingly fragile in recent years, due to a lack of resilience in their funding model, which is heavily reliant on gifted income alongside NHS grants.

[Bell Ribeiro-Addy (Streatham) (Lab)]

Royal Trinity Hospice in my constituency supports people across central and south-west London to live and die well. Next year it will cost it £19 million to deliver care for its around 2,500 patients and support for their nearly 1,000 loved ones—a 20% on-year increase. Meanwhile, the NHS funding that it receives will decrease in real terms to 24% of the costs of running its services. Does the hon. Member agree that the Government should commit to maintaining the funding levels that hospices such as Royal Trinity require to ensure that people receive the quality of end of life care and the dignified death that they deserve?

[Sally-Ann Hart]

This is the point of the debate: to work out what sort of funding models we need. ICBs also need to be given the freedom to assess the priorities in their local areas, but I take that on board.

We have eight hospices across Sussex, and in 2019 seven of them formed the Sussex hospice collaborative—partnership working to ensure that the hospices’ combined resources can be used to maximise the impact, reach and cost-effectiveness of their activities. NHS Sussex works closely with that collaborative arrangement, which has supported the ability to have collective conversations. In January, the APPG on hospice and end of life care published a report on Government funding for hospices. The inquiry found that despite the introduction of a legal requirement for integrated care boards to commission palliative and end of life care, ICB commissioning of hospice services is currently not fit for purpose, and the value that hospices provide to individuals in the wider health system is at risk.

Hospice funding has historically not risen in line with inflation, which has been brought starkly to light during the periods of high inflation in recent years. Costs to keep palliative services running have increased rapidly over the past few years, but that is not reflected in the Government funding that hospices receive to deliver the services, which has increased by only 1% each year on average.