Palliative and End-of-Life Care (Glasgow)

To ask the Scottish Government how it works with Glasgow city health and social care partnership to help reduce unscheduled presentations to acute services among people requiring palliative and end-of-life care. (S7O-00465)

Senior officials meet regularly with chief officers of health and social care partnerships, including Glasgow city HSCP, to discuss a range of topics of strategic and immediate importance. Last year, we published our palliative care strategy for 2025 to 2030, which was developed through engagement with key stakeholders, including health and social care partnerships. It outlines an aim that people of all ages with life-shortening conditions receive palliative care and care around dying and that their families and their carers receive bereavement support, based on what matters to them.

Following the strategy’s publication, NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde has been working together with local health and social care partnerships to develop its strategy for palliative care and care around dying. That strategy was discussed and approved by the NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde board on 29 October. I also note that the Scottish Ambulance Service has in place, and is developing, pathways around improving palliative care.

Marie Curie’s fast-track service, which provides urgent specialist palliative nursing care at home and keeps people out of hospital, looks set to end if Glasgow city HSCP ratifies its plans, with district nursing teams having to try and pick up unmet demand. Around £500,000 will be withdrawn from the service, with roughly half of that being Marie Curie’s own funds that it brings to the table. Does the minister share my concern that those reforms appear to have been developed without the participation of Marie Curie, and that they may increase pressure on unscheduled care and result in a poorer quality of care overall? Will the minister join me in asking Glasgow city health and social care partnership to meet Marie Curie to discuss how they can work together to ensure that a rapid response service continues?

I absolutely appreciate the valued work that Marie Curie staff do; indeed, I went to visit them in Glasgow in July. Decisions on how best to deliver services for local communities are, ultimately, for those integration authorities to make, in consultation with the people that use those services, and in full awareness of the impact on them. If Glasgow city health and social care partnership has not already met Marie Curie to discuss the implications of those decisions, I would certainly hope that it will do so.