A news item in today's Times provides a textbook example of the reasons why this Government has failed us so badly. A year ago Health Secretary Alan Johnson announced £286m extra health spending for palliative care (to honour a manifesto commitment).But nearly all the local health trusts surveyed recently by Help the Hospices said they not seen the money and that it had been lost in the system. If you want to know what happened to it, take a look at the Department of Health's first annual report on the 'End of life care strategy'' (62 full colour pages) which asserts that the initiative is off to a great start: it is establishing a National Implementation Advisory Board and a National Coalition to raise public awareness, has published a set of Quality Markers and core competencies, built monitoring into Operation Finance Guidance, tendered for a pilot of a national survey and begun the process to set up an Intelligence Network. It has also published no less than four separate strategic frameworks for SHAs, who have, the report claims, spent the first year "establishing the infrastructure which will support activity in the context of the Next Stage Review."
Does that sound to you like a good way to spend taxpayers' money? If the Government had given £286m - or even a quarter of that money - direct to the hospice movement, wouldn't that have been a better way to improve the lives of the terminally ill? As I pointed in a report last week for the Centre for Policy Studies, the "reality gap" between government rhetoric and real life in Britain today is dangerously wide, and nowhere more so than in our public services. Indeed, as this latest example shows, it's a matter of life and death.
