Terminal Illnesses

(asked on 9th July 2018) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment his Department has made of the merits of allowing clinicians to to determine if someone is terminally ill instead of requiring a reasonable expectation of death within six months.


Answered by
Caroline Dinenage Portrait
Caroline Dinenage
This question was answered on 12th July 2018

Decisions regarding patient prognosis are a matter for individual clinicians or clinical teams, consulting with specialists as appropriate. There are a number of tools that clinicians may employ to support decision making in this regard, such as the Gold Standards Framework (GSF) Prognostic Indicator Guidance, which a clinician may use to assess whether a patient is in the last 12 months of life, to enable them to put in the necessary support that patient may need.

The GSF was originally developed in 2000 as a grass roots initiative to improve primary palliative care from within primary care. Following a pilot in 2001, its usage was spread through a national programme supported by the National Health Service, Macmillan and the Department. The Prognostic Indicator Guidance provides useful prompts or ‘triggers’ to a healthcare professional that discussions about the end of life should be initiated, if this has not already happened. More information about the GSF can be found at the following link:

www.goldstandardsframework.org.uk/

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