Palliative Care
(asked on 14th November 2017) - View Source
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, how much his Department has spent on palliative care in each of the last seven years.
The Department has made no specific assessment of local palliative services care in England. As system leader, NHS England is responsible for securing the provision of high quality care for patients at the end of life, and as with the vast majority of NHS services, the commissioning of palliative and end of life care is a local matter, over which individual clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) have responsibility.
CCGs are best placed to understand the needs of local populations and commission services to meet those needs accordingly, and as such, decisions to increase palliative care service provision are for the local, not the national, National Health Service. NHS England works to support local commissioners in improving the services they provide, including palliative care, and has recently collaborated with Public Health England and the Care Quality Commission to provide bespoke end of life care support to Sustainability and Transformation Partnerships, include Hampshire and Isle of Wight. A copy of the support pack is attached.
Much of the palliative care patients receive will be provided either in outpatient or community settings, by nurses, community teams or general practitioners as part of general NHS services provision, rather than as an identified palliative care service. In such services, data are either not available or does not identify palliative treatment. In addition, social and voluntary sector organisations can provide additional support to patients and the end of life. Therefore, figures for the average cost and average time for treating a terminally ill person and figures for the number of patients offered end of life care in the home are not available.
On 5 July 2016 we published ‘Our Commitment to you’ for end of life care, which set out what everyone should expect from their care at the end of life and the actions we are taking to make high quality, personalised care a reality for everyone. This includes measures to enable personalisation, measures to improve care quality and education and training in end of life care and measures to encourage the spread of innovative models of care. The commitment sets out that by 2020 we want to significantly improve patient choice, including ensuring an increase in the number of people able to die in the place of their choice, including at home. A progress report on delivery of the commitment was published on 21 September 2017.
A key tool in measuring choice and quality in end of life care is the National Survey of Bereaved People (VOICES) survey, which collects the views of bereaved family and friends about the care received by the person they were caring for at the end of life. The survey does provide some information about preferences for care at the end of life, including place of death. The Government Choice Commitment; progress report on the Choice Commitment; and latest VOICES survey report can be found at the following links:
www.gov.uk/government/publications/choice-in-end-of-life-care-government-response