B

Baroness Hollins (CB)

Speaking in the House of Lords on 21 November 2025

Debate

Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Contribution

My Lords, we are going to address palliative care in detail in a later group. We are going to make a distinction between palliative care of a general kind and specialist palliative care, and we are going to think about specialist palliative care at its best. Again, we hear day in, day out about how hospices are closing or having to make staff redundant— I think there is a hospice in Hertfordshire that is just starting its redundancy programme this week because it does not have the money to provide for people’s needs—yet we are relying on our hospices to provide that care, which is not sufficiently available. When I asked my husband’s GP who was going to co-ordinate his care, because there were several different teams involved, said, “Oh, the hospice nurse will do that”. I thought: the hospice nurse or the community nurse who does not have access to all his notes and records? I was surprised that hospice nurses would take precedence over the GP and the district nurses. They did and they were brilliant but, golly, were they short-staffed.

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