Palliative Care: Children
(asked on 31st October 2018) - View Source
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to ensure that guidance given to NHS and social care commissioners on how to commission children’s palliative care reflects National Institute for Health and Care Excellence guidance and quality standards.
‘End of Life Care for Infants, Children and Young People: Planning and Management’, published by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) in December 2016, sets out best practice for local services to deliver end of life and palliative care for infants, children and young with life-limiting conditions. The guidance was developed with the help of children at the end of their lives, as well as their brothers and sisters, in order to reflect what they felt was important from their care.
Local commissioners, who are responsible for delivering the majority children’s palliative and end of life care, should take NICE guidance into account when planning services for local populations. To support implementation of the guidance NHS England commissioned Together for Short Lives, who are the leading children’s end of life care charity to examine services across the country to identify best practice in implementation of the guidance, as well as barriers, through interviews with local NHS services. Together for Short Lives has now provided a suite of solutions to enable local areas to meet the needs of children at the end of life. More information about this work can be found at the following link:
In September 2017 NICE published a Quality Standard (QS), based on its clinical guideline on end of life and palliative care in for infants, children and young with life-limiting conditions. QSs are important in setting out to patients, the public, commissioners and providers what a high-quality service should look like in a particular area of care. Whilst providers and commissioners must have regard to NICE QSs in planning and delivering services, they do not provide a comprehensive service specification and are not mandatory. Both the clinical guideline and QS can be found at the following links: