Stephen O’Brien MP is the Shadow Health Minister and MP for Eddisbury. The Conservative Palliative Care Policy is included in ‘The Patient will see you now, Doctor’.
Politics lends itself to the imagery of death – to topple a minister is to ‘gain a scalp’, to broach certain topics is ‘career-death’, the New Labour version of spin is to “bury” bad news, and, of course, we all are waiting for this Prime Minister to be ‘stabbed in the back’.
Yet I have no doubt that politicians are at one with our constituents in avoiding considering our actual mortality and that of our nearest and dearest, and the Government’s End of Life Care Strategy makes welcome mention of that fact – with fewer people dying at home (one in five of the 500,000 that die each year, as against the two thirds who would like to), our experience of death has been relegated to fictional narratives and inoculating news cycles.
‘Dying isn’t a very sexy subject for news editors’ - Janet Street Porter in the Independent echoes in Alan Johnson’s complaint, but Thursday’s papers rose manfully to the debate with both the Mail and the Times including moving personal accounts of death and dying, alongside broader news and comment articles.
The broad thrust of the Government’s End of Life Care Strategy is to support rapid response palliative care teams to enable people to stay in their own homes as they approach the end of their lives, based the Marie Curie delivering choice pilot, underpinned with £88m in 2009/10 and £198m in 2010/11.
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