07.04.16
New palliative care funding guidelines to be in place from April 2017
New palliative care guidelines to help decide how funding is allocated will be in place from April next year, NHS England and Public Health England announced today.
The set of developmental currencies, which are used to categorise adults and children receiving palliative care according to need and help decide how funding is allocated, will be announced later in the year.
NHS England and Public Health England are currently consulting on alternatives to the ‘per patient tariff’ proposed by the Palliative Care Funding Review of 2011.
They said that there are insufficient resources for developing national data collection and a national data standard, but local commissioners and providers will be able to adapt the data to suit their needs.
They urged specialist palliative care providers and hospices to submit their aggregate minimum datasets to the National Council for Palliative Care, which is commissioned by Public Health England and Hospice UK to conduct this data collection and analysis on their behalf, or to continue to engage in this process if they already do so.
A recent Royal College of Physicians audit found that palliative care has improved since the abolition of the Liverpool Care Pathway, but still has many problems, including a lack of 24/7 specialist care.