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 children with life-limiting conditions and their families have access to children's palliative care in the community out-of-hours and at weekends.

High quality community care is crucial to the delivery of end of life care services and our Choice Commitment, this includes out-of-hours and weekend services. Work undertaken by NHS England and system partners at a national level includes supporting sustainability and transformation partnership planning to address end of life care in all settings and providing key data on services; providing guidance on cost effective commissioning in end of life care; and providing practical examples of how out-of-hours access to palliative care, seven days a week, can be achieved.

Going forward, we will have new measures in place to assess progress and hold commissioners to account, including a new indicator to measure deaths in hospital after three or more emergency admissions in the final 90 days of life, which will help us assess quality and provision of out of hospital care.

NHS England is currently working with experts to develop new commissioning models for children and young people’s palliative care as it can be difficult for some clinical commissioning groups to meet the needs of this vulnerable group given the relatively small number of children concerned and their geographical spread.