Hospice Care Week begins today, running from 6-12 October, and this year’s theme is ‘more than you think’. Organisations have taken up this important message, with Anne-Marie Roberts, director of clinical services at St Leonard’s Hospice in York, telling The York Press:
“It’s widely thought that hospice care is only about care at the very end of life, or that it only takes place in a hospice building. In reality, hospice care is about living well. Our support extends beyond the walls of the building, reaching into people’s own homes and our community.”
Regrettably, though, the flipside to that theme, ‘more than you think’, is ‘less than you need’, with increasingly dire headlines in recent weeks illustrating a deepening funding crisis.
“Pembrokeshire’s only hospice, Shalom House Hospice, based in Nun Street, has announced that it will close its doors at the end of October.” (Western Telegraph, 6 October)
‘The removal of £800,000 in NHS funding a year for end-of-life care “has truly devastated us all”, a hospice boss has said. The money enabled people to be treated in their final days at Arthur Rank Hospice instead of at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge. Nine inpatient beds will have to close at the Cambridge-based hospice’ (BBC, 1 October 2025)
“St Columba’s Hospice Care and Marie Curie Edinburgh are warning that essential palliative and end-of-life care services are now at serious risk due to funding decisions made by the Edinburgh Health and Social Care Partnership (HSCP) and inaction by the Scottish Government.The HSCP has chosen to reverse a 3% inflationary uplift in funding to hospices, which they committed to earlier in the year.” (St Columba’s Hospice, 1 September 2025)
The assisted suicide bill currently before Parliament has prompted many to point out that services were overstretched to begin with; as former NHS England Chief Executive Lord Stevens of Birmingham said during the Second Reading debate in the Lords:
“Over 100,000 people die each year in this country without the palliative and end-of-life care that they would have benefited from. Two-thirds of people report being fearful that they will not have access to palliative care when they need it. So, to the extent that the Bill is about autonomy, you cannot have meaningful choice without having palliative care as part of that choice.”
That bill could well compound the crisis in hospice care; as Lord Green of Deddington said:
“A further major difficulty in the present Bill is that, while doctors can decline to be involved in the new system, hospices and care homes cannot, as bodies, opt out. Indeed, some care homes might well feel obliged to close. That will be a very serious blow to a lot of people.”
Advocates of “assisted dying” almost always cite “choice”, but in a country where an increasing number don’t have access to care that would allow them to live with dignity until natural death, assisted suicide would risk becoming Hobson’s Choice.
(Image: Howard Lake/Creative Commons)
