Palliative Care Bill [HL]

My Lords, like other noble Lords, I feel a great debt to my noble friend Lady Finlay of Llandaff for introducing this important Bill. As many points have already been made, I shall be very brief. I believe that the crucial term in the Bill is ““strategy””—this is about a strategy for palliative care. A strategy will have more fundamental and less fundamental parts. I entirely share the objective of palliative care that provides for the social, emotional and spiritual needs of each person as he or she is dying, but in all of this one of the great triumphs of the hospice movement has been to attend to pain relief. I believe that this has a certain strategic priority because it makes it easier to attend to all the other things that the dying person may need. We have heard some hard experiences, and I am going to tell your Lordships one more. My brother was a very well organised man and, when he knew he was dying, he made contact with the local hospice and the local nursing home. He visited both and knew what was available. When he decided—and it was his decision—that we were no longer able to look after him at home, which was true, he asked me to ring the hospice. It said that there were six people ahead of him before there would be a bed available. That meant that six people would have to die. I knew that my brother had waited until the last moment and that he could not wait for that, so his GP got him into the nursing home. The staff there, together with the local vicar, were splendid at giving emotional, social and spiritual care but they did not have the authority to prescribe additional drugs, and it was Christmas weekend. As Christmas Day and Boxing Day—your Lordships will remember that it was the day of the tsunami—went by, I began to long for him to die soon because it was not possible to give him the pain care to which he was entitled, which he needed and of which those running the nursing home had full experience; but, in the wake of the Shipman inquiry, they did not have the authority, without the say-so of people they could not reach, to increase the amount of morphine.