News

Palliative care under-funded and patchy, report says

17-Dec-07

Over-reliance on charity funding for palliative care in the UK exacerbates inequalities and has created a patchy service, a report says.

The NHS pays for 30 per cent of palliative care services, while charities and voluntary organisations foot the bill for the rest, according to the report by the Royal College of Physicians.

This reliance on charity funding has ‘led to poor planning and overall integration of services’, the report says.

It highlights a ‘lack of commercial incentives for the development of new pharmacological interventions in palliative medicine’ as a ‘threat to the exploitation of scientific advances to improve treatment’, and calls for NHS funding to plug the gap.

The report also calls for additional training for health professionals in palliative care.

nick.bostock@haymarket.com

Comment below and tell us what you think

Comments

Nick Bostock

18/12/2007

Is reliance on charity funding to top up healthcare services inevitable in a tax-funded NHS?

Ingrid Collins

02/01/2008

Palliative care could be reduced to a minimum (and therefore need a much smaller allocation of the budget) if all medical practitioners trained in some complementary techniques such as spiritual healing and/or bioresonance such as the Living Information Forms Energy (LIFE) System, and understood the principles of positive psychological interventions. The medics we have trained here at The Soul Therapy Centre report much less need for palliative care, much smaller number of referrals on to hospitals, much greater job satisfaction and many more positive outcomes when using subtle energy techniques.

Ingrid J Collins

Only registered users may comment. Log in now or register for a free account.