Latest news from SPPC
Palliative care is everybody's business
The Scottish Partnership for Palliative Care has published a report of its 2010 Annual Conference
To view the report, please click here.
“Death Row Drug Fed to Dying OAPs”
Comment by Mark Hazelwood, Director, Scottish Partnership for Palliative Care
on Daily Record article on 1st February, headlined “Death Row Drug Fed to Dying OAPs”
“The Liverpool Care Pathway for the Dying Patient (LCP) is about ensuring in a systematic way good quality care in the last days and hours of a person’s life. The LCP is in wide use in hospices. The quality of care in Scotland’s hospices is quite rightly highly regarded and trusted by the Scottish public. Increasingly hospitals in Scotland are using LCP or similar approaches, precisely because it offers a means of improving the quality of care that a dying patient receives.
The decision to start a person on the LCP can be changed if their condition improves. Patients on the pathway are regularly monitored, and this can trigger such a decision. Experience suggests that this happens in about 3% of cases. Discussion with a patient’s family is a central part of the LCP.
In palliative care a variety of drugs may be used to alleviate symptoms and to support quality of life as death approaches. Drugs are not used with the purpose of shortening life.
LCP allows care to be audited and problems identified. Research studies have shown improvements in the end of life care received by patients and their families where LCP or similar approaches are put in place.”
Update - e bulletin
Scottish Partnership for Palliative Care
Welcome to UPDATE, the new electronic bulletin from the Scottish Partnership for Palliative Care.
If you have news, an event or some good practice then please get in touch for inclusion in future editions.
Palliative Care Funding Review - Interim Report
In December 2010 the Palliative Care Funding Review team published its interim report, which can be viewed at: http://palliativecarefunding.org.uk/InterimReport.pdf
(This report is the result of the Coalition Government’s commitment to introducing a new per-patient funding system for providers of palliative care. The Secretary of State for Health, Andrew Lansley, asked Tom Hughes-Hallett (Marie Curie Cancer Care), to chair an independent review with the specific remit of recommending a funding system which enables dedicated palliative care to be available for all people in England who require it.)
Commission on Assisted Dying
The Commission on Assisted Dying was launched on 30 November 2010. Demos are providing the research secretariat and administrative support to the Commission, which was set up with funding provided by Bernard Lewis and Terry Pratchett. A statement from Dignity in Dying states that it “helped to facilitate the creation of the Commission, and secured its funding although beyond this it has played no role and the Commission, including the Chair, Commissioners and Secretariat are independent of Dignity in Dying”.
The Commission’s website states that:
“The commission is to act entirely independently and the commission alone will be responsible for its conclusions. In particular, the commission will be independent from Demos and the funders.”
The aims of the commission, are to:
- investigate the circumstances under which it should be possible for people to be assisted to die
- recommend what system, if any, should exist to allow people to be assisted to die
- identify who should be entitled to be assisted to die
- determine what safeguards should be put in place to ensure that vulnerable people are neither abused nor pressured to choose an assisted death
- recommend what changes in the law, if any, should be introduced
More information is available at: www.commissiononassisteddying.co.uk
RSS