Hospice Services: Support

Stephanie Peacock Excerpts

Wednesday 14th June 2023 Westminster Hall

[Stephanie Peacock (Barnsley East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Nokes. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Eastleigh (Paul Holmes) for securing this important debate and for his incredibly powerful speech; I pass on my condolences. I also pay tribute to Barnsley Hospice and Bluebell Wood Children’s Hospice in South Yorkshire, which I want to focus on.

Six-year-old Daniel from Darfield in Barnsley has been receiving care at Bluebell Wood for mitochondrial disease and cerebral palsy. He struggles to sit, eat and stand, and his family simply do not know how long they have left, but they treasure every day despite facing many challenges. Daniel has received excellent care, and his family are grateful to Bluebell Wood for all that it does, but they want greater security for hospices and they want to speak directly to the Government to ask for it, because they do not know whether Daniel will be able to receive the end of life care that he might need at Bluebell Wood. I have raised this issue at Prime Minister’s questions and I was grateful for my discussion with the Minister when I met her a few weeks ago.

Last year, Bluebell Wood hospice was forced to close because of staffing pressures. It is now open again, but only to 90% of its capacity. When I visited a few weeks ago, the staff spoke about not only how they are of course there to provide end of life care, but how they do so much more. They provide respite care and support for parents, siblings and families. They try to provide fun and happiness, to make memories at what is an incredibly difficult and traumatic time. I saw that work at first hand. It was incredibly moving also to see at first hand the hospice’s end of life suite. The staff took me into what they call the cold room, which is where families will spend their final time together at the very end of the life and after passing. Often, it is where the larger family can say their goodbyes.

The staff told me that there is nothing they can do to prolong a child’s life at the worst moment in a family’s life, but what they can do is do everything they can to support families, which is often so important to the grieving process. That is the most powerful case for the provision of greater support and security for hospices—for all the different things we have spoken about today, including the continuation of the energy support grant, particularly for children’s hospices, and of course the provision of a longer-term and more secure model.

I conclude by thanking the amazing staff, medics and volunteers who continue to do all the work that they do at Bluebell Wood, at Barnsley Hospice and at hospices across the country, so that Daniel and all the children and young people in a similar situation receive the care they deserve when they need it.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Minister for Social Care (Helen Whately)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Nokes. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Eastleigh (Paul Holmes) for securing this debate on hospices, and I thank all hon. Members who have contributed. Both the number of colleagues in the room and the passion of so many contributions show the strength of feeling and level of support for hospices in all our communities.

We have heard from so many colleagues this morning: my hon. Friends the Members for Darlington (Peter Gibson), for Aberconwy (Robin Millar), for Bolton West (Chris Green), for Torbay (Kevin Foster), for North West Norfolk (James Wild) and for Worcester (Mr Walker), and the hon. Members for Blackburn (Kate Hollern), for City of Chester (Samantha Dixon), for Bolton South East (Yasmin Qureshi), for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron), for York Central (Rachael Maskell), for Barnsley East (Stephanie Peacock), for Lancaster and Fleetwood (Cat Smith) and for Strangford (Jim Shannon). In addition, many other hon. Members have contributed by intervening. In the course of today’s debate, many fantastic local hospices have rightly been praised for what they do for our communities.

My hon. Friend the Member for Eastleigh spoke about the Mountbatten hospice in his constituency and how it cared so wonderfully for his friend and colleague Sue Hall. Many hon. Members spoke about their personal experiences, which often involved family members, and the amazing ways that hospices have helped family members and themselves through difficult times. I, too, remember the amazing care that my granny received in her local hospice in Dorset when I was in my twenties. I still hold in my head the experience of visiting her there—the tranquillity of the hospice and the amazing care that she was clearly receiving, which made the last weeks of her life as bearable as possible. I remember the kindness and peace that I felt there in that hospice. I, too, have that personal experience and appreciation of what hospices do.

A theme of this debate has, rightly, been the importance of dying well—dying with dignity and dying with the right care in the place where a person wants to die, which is very often at home. Dying well depends on good end of life care, for which we in this country rightly have a good reputation. Most end of life care is provided through NHS services, but hospices are an important part of end of life and palliative care in our communities. As we know, hospices provide care in their facilities, but increasingly and very importantly they provide care to people in their own homes towards the end of their lives, and also support families through those difficult times and through bereavement.

[Stephanie Peacock]

The end of life care that I spoke about in my contribution, which is so important, remains closed at Bluebell Wood Children’s Hospice; it is the one part of the hospice that has been unable to reopen. Will the Minister commit to doing everything that she can to support the hospice to reopen, so that it can continue to provide end of life care, and not just all the other services it provides to families that need them so much?

[Helen Whately]

As the hon. Member mentioned earlier, we have indeed met and spoken about the hospice to which she refers. I have also met with several other hon. Members. I am grateful to them for coming to me to talk about the specific difficult situations faced by some of the hospices serving their communities.

That brings me to exactly what I was coming to talk about: the financial pressures on hospices, which have been a strong theme of the debate. I know very well, not just from this debate but from conversations with hospices, about the financial challenges that hospices are facing. In fact, financial challenges are being faced by many organisations that provide care in our communities, whether NHS organisations or care homes, as the hon. Member for Leicester West (Liz Kendall) mentioned. In particular, there are the extra pressures of energy costs—such organisations often use substantial amounts of energy—and the higher costs of staff pay. We know that many hospices pay their staff in alignment with the NHS agenda for change pay scales.

An additional difficult context for hospices at the moment is fundraising. That was clearly hard during the pandemic, but since then many households have been affected by the higher cost of living and therefore have found it harder to contribute to fundraising efforts in their communities, including those organised by hospices. I know how hard that context is for our hospices.

On energy costs, many hospices have been able to benefit from the Government’s energy bill relief scheme, which ran to 31 March. Eligible organisations, including hospices, will continue to get baseline discount support for gas and electricity bills under the energy bills discount scheme, which is running from 1 April 2023 to 31 March 2024. In addition, last year NHS England released £1.5 billion of extra funding to integrated care boards in recognition of the extra costs arising from inflation in the services they commission. ICBs have been responsible for distributing that funding according to local need, including to palliative and end of life care providers in our communities, whether they are NHS organisations or hospices.