Rachel Clarke is right to highlight the pressures on palliative care, but wrong to suggest that assisted dying debates have sidelined these concerns (As a palliative care specialist, I’ve witnessed the human tragedy of our end-of-life care crisis, 10 November). In fact, the opposite is true. The CEO of Hospice UK, Toby Porter, has stated that the government’s £100m investment in hospices, announced last December, would probably not have materialised without the terminally ill adults bill. He recently told a special Lords select committee that the bill has sparked more conversation about end-of-life care than at any point in his long career.
The health minister, Stephen Kinnock, similarly acknowledged that the bill has been a catalyst for long-overdue improvements in palliative care, rolling the pitch for another announcement in the coming weeks. We know this has been the case around the world, as experts from the UK and Australia highlighted recently (Letters, 5 November).
