Chair of the Welsh Parliament’s Cross Party Group on Hospices and Palliative Care, and North Wales MS, Mark Isherwood has welcomed the “long-awaited” additional funding to Welsh hospices and praised the hospices themselves for “the enormous work they have put into achieving this”.
In her Statement yesterday on ‘Reform of Hospice Funding’, Eluned Morgan MS, the Minister for Health and Social Services, said the Welsh Government would be making an additional £2.2 million available to Welsh hospices on a recurring basis from 2022-23 onwards, including £888,000 to children’s hospices Tŷ Hafan & Tŷ Gobaith.
Mr Isherwood has been calling for increased funding for Welsh hospices for many years, and before the Welsh Government eventually allocated £14m of emergency funding to support Welsh hospices throughout the pandemic, had also repeatedly raised the gap between the money the Welsh Government received from the UK Government in consequence of its funding for hospices throughout the pandemic in England and the amount the Welsh Government initially allocated to support hospices in Wales.
Welcoming news of the additional £2.2 Million in yesterday’s meeting of the Welsh Parliament, he said:
“12 years after I hosted the 2006 Assembly event highlighting the essential role played by Hospices in providing palliative care services in Wales, and calling on the Welsh Government to address the growing funding crisis they were facing, attended by every Hospice in Wales, I Chaired the Cross Party Group on Hospices and Palliative Care’s enquiry into ‘Inequalities in Access to Hospice and Palliative Care’ in Wales, which found that ‘there is significant unmet need and under-met need’; that Statutory Hospice funding had flatlined for a decade and therefore fallen in real terms each year; that Statutory funding of children’s Hospices in Wales was significantly lower than in England and Scotland; and that statutory funding for adult hospices in Wales as a percentage of expenditure was lower than in other UK Nation.
“In responses to Written Questions last year, this Health Minister confirmed that of its £8.4 million End of Life Funding, only some £800,000 was allocated specifically to support specialist palliative care services across Wales, and less than £200,000 of this went directly to Children’s Hospices, with none for Adult Hospices. Yet, for example, we heard at last Thursday’s Cross-Party Group on Funerals and Bereavement, which I Chaired, that the joint project between Cardiff and Bristol Universities to explore bereavement care and experiences during Covid-19 found that these were far more positive when support was provided by Hospices.
“Given all of the above, I join our hospices in welcoming this long-awaited announcement and must flag up the enormous work they have put into achieving this - including the Tŷ Hafan & Tŷ Gobaith Children’s Hospices Lifeline Fund Campiagn, noting that they received less than 10 percent of their funding from statutory sources in Wales, the lowest level of state funding across the UK nations, and calling for the Welsh Government to provide the lifeline that hundreds of children and their families across Wales so desperately need.”
Mr Isherwood asked the Minister a series of questions in relation to the additional funding, including whether this now closes the Hospice funding contribution gap with other UK Nations for both children’s and adult’s hospices and how the additional funding will be delivered.
He also asked her to provide details on what agreed costs she envisages the funding will cover.
He added:
“Finally, how will she, her officials and other public service partners continue to work with our adult and children’s hospices, without whose sustainability and input it will be impossible to create a compassionate Cymru, a Compassionate Wales?”
