Health and Care Bill — House of Lords, 2022-01-18
Topic: Health
Alan Thomas Howarth (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, while we all treasure the hospice movement and revere Cicely Saunders and her disciples, the grim fact is that there are all too many parts of the country where hospices are lacking and, as the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, explained, palliative care is limited and inadequate, or perhaps even non-existent. Of course, palliative care, available in every setting, must become a core responsibility of the NHS. We should not displace the hospices and the charitable ethos, but where hospices do not exist—mainly in poorer communities where fund-raising capacity is small—default provision should be made by the NHS. These amendments would secure universal availability of high-quality palliative care High-quality palliative care is, of course, not just a matter of technical skills in pain relief and so on. Dr Iona Heath, a past chair of the Royal College of General Practitioners, has written: "The whole discipline of medicine has colluded in the wider … project of seeking technical solutions to the existential problems posed by distress, suffering and the finitude of life and the inevitability of ageing, loss and death. Sickness and death have gradually come to be regarded as failures of medicine, even by doctors themselves, rather than inevitable constituents of what it is to be human." At a round table on the arts and palliative care, dying and bereavement convened by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Arts, Health and Wellbeing and chaired by the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, Dr Viv Lucas—medical director of the Garden House Hospice, Letchworth—said that the role of doctors in this context is not to cure disease but to heal their patients. She said that this implies "addressing the subjective experience of human suffering and facilitating a process of inner change—not about the technological doing to of the disease-orientated model but of being with, bearing witness." The hospice movement acknowledges creative work to be a vital human activity. Through the arts, we can transcend suffering, come to terms with our own mortality and enable our own healing. Artist Virginia Hearth has said: "The arts offer us a way of making sense of the world and help us to define who we are and who we have been." There is an abundance of evidence cited in the World Health Organization scoping review of the benefits of the arts in end-of-life care, through opportunities for communication and emotional expression, reframing of the illness experience, and enhanced human connection Equally, the arts can help families watching their loved ones approach death and afterwards. At another APPG round table, the director of Grampian Hospitals Art Trust, Sally Thomson, read out a letter from a woman whose husband had been diagnosed with terminal cancer: "To be given a terminal prognosis is devastating for both the patient and family. To take away your future, the opportunity to grow old and grey with your spouse and to watch your children grow and thrive. You lose your independence and your sense of self, your purpose and role in life. Yet in the midst of this suffering lies the Artroom. An oasis of positivity and fulfilment providing a different purpose. One of creativity and self-expression. It is a place where the self is rediscovered and allowed to flourish … It’s medicine for the soul and every bit as vital as drugs and chemotherapy. A life-fulfilling experience that has changed both our lives for the better." As Dr Rachel Clarke, a palliative care doctor, writes in her beautiful book, Dear Life: "What I witness, over and over, in the hospice … is that there is nothing more powerful than another human presence … reaching out with love and tenderness towards one of our own."