Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what recent steps they have taken to improve the provision of palliative care services.

The Department and NHS England are taking steps to improve palliative care services, including the development of a per-patient funding model for palliative care services that aims to improve access to specialist palliative care.

NHS England has established palliative care networks across England which are supporting improvements in palliative care services and sharing of good practice. NHS Improving Quality’s (NHS IQ) Transforming End of Life Care (EoLC) in Acute Hospitals programme is also helping to drive improvements for people in hospitals, such as the wider implementation of electronic palliative care registers (EPaCCS). These can provide instant access to key information about EoLC patients to all health professionals with a need to see it. NHS IQ has set an ambition to achieve a 70% roll out of EPaCCs by 2015.

On 1 July 2014, we announced a review of choice in EoLC led by Claire Henry, Chief Executive of the National Council for Palliative Care. The Programme Board leading this work consists of representatives from charities, people with personal experience of EoLC (including carers), clinicians and policy makers. The review will undertake extensive public consultation to define what people want in EoLC services, and will provide advice to the Government on the policy initiatives required to enable people’s preferences to be met. This advice will be provided by early next year.