gill

This is Trevor Fisher, an inpatient in @ArthurRankHouse in Cambridgeshire, speaking to @Channel4News this week. I am a palliative care specialist and Trevor’s interview has devastated me. His hospice has just found out that in 6 months, Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Trust will withdraw its £800k funding. This means that 9 of the hospice’s 16 beds will close, denying patients like Trevor the precious end-of-life care they need. In total, 200 people a year in Cambridgeshire will now be forced to die in an overcrowded hospital instead of the hospice environment they so longed for. Some will doubtless end up dying on trolleys in corridors - we witness this far too often, these days & I can tell you, it is barbaric. @CUH_NHS says it has made this “very difficult decision” following a “value for money assessment” - confirming what I have long known as a doctor, that too often, patients with terminal illnesses are treated as second class citizens whose lives simply don’t matter as much as other people's. Yet the real responsibility here lies not with the NHS trust but with the current government, who is forcing the NHS nationwide to cut clinical services in order to meet impossible “efficiency savings” (what weasel words those are). These cuts were necessary, say @CUH_NHS, “in order to maintain core services within a reduced budget” - that is to say, the reduced budget they are now receiving from this government. So this is on you, @wesstreeting, and on you @UKLabour. You've chosen to do this & now patients like Trevor must live - and die - with your choices. I believe that the measure of a civilised country is how well it cares for its most vulnerable members. The difference between politicians and me is that I look the palliative care patients they are failing in the eye. So I will put it to you directly, Mr Streeting. We are still a rich country capable of affording decent, humane palliative care for all. Do you really care so little for dying people that you are happy to fail them on your watch? Thank you @channel4news for covering this story. #palliativecare #hospicecare #NHS