Government launches new funding boost for children’s palliative care

Care services minister Ivan Lewis has launched a 20 million pound funding boost to improve local palliative care services for children with life-threatening conditions.

The funding arrives alongside a new framework – Children’s Palliative Care Strategy ‘Better Care: Better Lives’- which has been designed to improve care for the country’s sickest children.

Mr Lewis confirmed that the funding allocation would provide a further 10 million pounds per year until 2011 for children’s hospices and hospice-at-home care.

Commenting on the new framework, he stated: “This is about a service-wide push to drive up quality and standards, which relies on getting everything – personalised services, commissioning frameworks, the right capacity – to work together to achieve the best possible outcomes for parents and children.”

The framework calls on local commissioners, providers and regulators to develop local strategies to allow every child with a life-threatening condition to have access to high-quality, family-centred care.

It also calls for greater equality of access to universal services, greater choice and more responsible and accountable leadership in the care sector.

This week saw the Department of Health announce that the NHS had made significant progress in the treatment of heart disease.