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Children’s Hospices

I agree with my hon. Friend and will address that remark directly in a moment. Several key themes emerged from ACT’s work. In particular, it highlighted the importance of positively influencing the planning and development of future hospices. The association’s experience suggests that the desire to set up a hospice often comes from the tragic struggle of a particular family, which can generate enormous energy and a single-minded determination to see through an important dream. To help ensure that such energy is channelled in the right way, the Department can do a great deal more to support innovative services. Crucially—this point lies at the heart of the debate—we must ensure that such services are sustained in the long run once they have been started. To help those with ambitions to set up hospices, the Department has provided funding for ACT to develop a toolkit on how children’s hospices work. The toolkit aims to provide references to the sources of information that are required successfully to plan and establish a service, so that any new services can make more informed decisions about how a venture should look. The toolkit will provide a far better understanding of what is involved in starting and running a children’s hospice service and an overview of the challenges and pitfalls that such a project may involve. Most importantly, the toolkit will emphasise the importance of consultation at the beginning of the process. It will also emphasise that children often need different sorts of services, particularly hospice-at-home services. ACT has commented that although establishing a hospice-at-home service is not an easy task, it is often possible to get it up and running far more quickly. Moreover, it can provide a more flexible option by responding to changes in families’ needs and expanding or reducing in response to other external factors. Day care and hospice-at-home services should not be viewed as second-class options.