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Children’s Hospices

My hon. Friend has highlighted the fact that hospices are dealing with a vast number of PCTs. It is a huge effort to extract any reply at all from some of them, and that problem is exacerbated if hospices have to write to even more PCTs. PCTs do not pay Treetops anything for supporting life-limited children and their families, more than half of whom are referrals from the PCTs. The hospice is funded almost entirely by public donations, and has also received some money from the New Opportunities Fund over a three-year period. The picture is the same up and down the country.