We often make the proud claim that the Wolfson Foundation has been funding the modern hospice movement since its inception. And it is true. We funded St Christopher’s Hospice in the late 1960s, and have supported the expansion and development of the hospice movement ever since.
What we must also confess, however, is that when Cicely Saunders – the great pioneer of the hospice movement – first approached the Foundation for funding in 1966, we turned her down. The precise reasons are obscured by time, although a note from one of our medical trustees recorded that “no one has any fundamental interest in persons with inoperable malignant disease and terminal conditions.” To be fair, he was lamenting that fact. But, even if his statement was true in the 1960s, it is emphatically not true now.
In the intervening decades the hospice movement has provided comfort and dignity to millions of people. At the end of her life (and at the start of my career in the sector), I spent some time with Dame Cicely Saunders. Her mantra, “you matter because you are you, and you matter to the end of your life,” fuelled by her Christian faith, shone through everything she did. And it continues to shine through the hospice movement.
That is why it is so distressing that, as we come to Hospice Care Week, hospices are in a more precarious state than at any time since we started funding them nearly 60 years ago. As Hospice UK starkly puts it, “hospices are underfunded … and under more pressure than ever.” The civil society model for palliative care has been an extraordinary success: delivering flexible, holistic and highly personalised care for both patients and their families.
In a society where roughly one in three people fails to get the end-of-life care they need, it is a tragedy that hospices across the UK are being forced to cut back their services. Having recently had a national debate about dying, we now need a national debate about palliative care and, in particular, how it can be funded properly and sustainably.
Paul Ramsbottom
To find out more about our funding for hospices, see here.
Images, top to bottom: Longfield Hospice Care; Paul Ramsbottom (c) John Cairns.
