Voluntary sector is missing from the NHS workforce plan

Palmer and Rosen outline the missing pieces in the NHS workforce plan,1 but there is an additional one that is overlooked—the role of the voluntary sector. I work in a Sue Ryder hospice and find it shameful that specialist palliative and end-of-life care only gets a third of its funding from the NHS.Anything that happens in the NHS workforce has massive implications for whether we can recruit and afford to pay the healthcare professionals we are so fortunate to work with.The Health and Care Act states that integrated care boards have a “statutory duty to commission palliative and end-of-life care,” but this might be interpreted in wildly different ways. It is not a strength of the hospice movement that it needs to sell secondhand clothes to look after patients and families (as was recently suggested by a minister2), but a great weakness. Why is this acceptable? It is not acceptable…
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