We continued to lobby the government on the need for fair long-term funding for independent charitable hospices.
In the run up to the general election, we had discussions with the main political parties about the need to reform government funding for hospices. Since these discussions, the new government has announced a review of palliative care funding, and Help the Hospices and our members have been invited to contribute to this.
As the End of Life Care Strategy for England entered its second year, we represented our members on the Department of Health’s Implementation Advisory Board for the strategy. This gave us a great opportunity to promote the role of hospices in delivering the strategy.
On behalf of our members, we also monitored the distribution of the extra £286 million funding announced by the strategy. We found that the majority of primary care trusts either had been unable to identify any additional funding, or had diverted the funding because of budget pressures.
Supporting our members with the commissioning of their services formed a key part of our policy work this year. Central to this work is the idea that hospices are effectively co-commissioners of palliative care services.
As well as producing guidance on the NHS Contract, we ran a three-day workshop with Manchester Business School to give hospice chief executives the skills they need to negotiate effectively with commissioners. We also produced briefings for primary care trusts which promoted the role of hospice care.
The general election in May 2010 provided a great opportunity to raise awareness of hospice care among parliamentary candidates. We took the lead on this and developed the ‘Hospice care manifesto’, which outlined the services hospices offer and asked for support for four key principles. Members were able to access the manifesto, along with a whole package of support materials (including guidance on campaigning), two months before the election, giving them time to promote it to their local candidates.
We made sure hospice care was high on the agenda of the three main political parties by holding a fringe event at each of their party conferences. Run in partnership with the MND Association and The Princess Royal Trust for Carers, the events focused on the personalisation agenda in health and social care, addressing the implications for providers, commissioners and service users.
As part of our efforts to build the evidence base for hospice care, we carried out a detailed analysis of the National Council for Palliative Care’s Minimum Data Set, and produced a series of briefings on our findings.
We also secured £17,000 from the James Tudor Foundation to develop a major new programme to collect comprehensive national statistics on hospice care.
