How many more hospices are going to have to make cuts to services, before the government acts? Anyone going to take a guess? It was so sad to hear yesterday that St Catherine’s Hospice Sussex and Surrey becomes the sixth hospice in the last couple of months to make cuts to services. St Catherine’s was my local hospice growing up in Crawley, and it is much loved for its outstanding specialised and personalised care. As an eight year old boy, I even remember fundraising for it, raising the grand total of £6.10! Because it’s not as if hospices and their local community don’t do their bit – Hospices rely on fundraising, as on average, only a 1/3 of their income comes from government. Which other intrinsic part of the health system is funded like this, with so little public funding? And government is failing to even keep up with this – increases to hospice funding are trifling. While government agrees to a NHS pay increase 5.5% this year (which sets the market for nurses’ salaries), it is not doing the same for hospice funding. On top of that, any hope of additional funding, because hospices are caring for more patients, because of our ageing population, appears to be a pipe dream. The amount of public funding for hospices and the system of how it’s calculated is broken. It needs fixing urgently. And the frustrating thing is, it’s so short-sighted. These cuts will result in more NHS costs, as more people have to go to hospital (with less end of life care specialism). This is when end of life care in the UK has been ranked as the best in the world, largely due to its hospice sector – something we’ve got right in the health sector. Dame Cicely Saunders set up the world’s first modern hospice at St Christopher’s in 1967. She was frustrated by a health system that focussed only on the “curable” rather than the dying. It appears we are in danger of making the same mistake now. What does this say about our society if we don’t look after the dying and those close to them?
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