Caroline Spelman MP: Improving end-of-life care

Conservative MP Caroline Spelman outlines the key points of her Palliative Care Bill, which is set for consideration in the Commons.

This Bill aims to confer on patients a right to choose where to receive palliative care.

Research carried out by Marie Curie Cancer care states that the majority of people with a terminal illness want to die at home and yet only one in five achieve this.

There were 503,000 deaths in England and Wales in 2006 and 290,000 of those took place in hospital. Although it is very expensive to keep a patient in an acute hospital bed, there is no adequate lever to enable this funding to follow a patient out of hospital and into the community.

The Palliative Care Bill 2009 would give a patient the right to make a request to a medical practitioner about where they want to receive their end-of-life care, be that an NHS hospital, a hospice, care home, hospital accommodation or the patient's own home.

It would also place a duty on the secretary of state to issue guidance relating to the transfer of funding between local authorities, NHS bodies and voluntary organisations as it is often the case that if a patient crosses from one governmental department to another and in so doing switches funding streams then the financial provision for their social care becomes very complex.

For relatives trying to care for a terminally-ill family member in the last days of their life, such bureaucracy and lack of co-ordination can make the situation incredibly difficult at perhaps their most vulnerable time.

The Bill attempts to address this issue by putting legislation in place that will co-ordinate care at the end of life.