The current local and national provision of palliative and end of life care

Empty beds across Hospices in the UK increasing in recent years.

As recently as in the last month, hospices in Sussex have announced they're stopping some services or that they are entering into 'consultation' (which usually results in reduced services and/or redundancies). There are multifactor causes attributed to this and this is an issue facing hospices across the country.

One of the services offered by hospices, is training and education in palliative and end of life care to local community providers, including nursing homes and care agencies. In order to preserve clinical staff with diminished funding as described in the articles above, education teams within hospices have been reduced, thereby effecting what training and courses they can offer and how many professionals they can reach.

So what do we know about the current state of palliative and end of life care education in community services?

We know that the UK government 'partially accepts' that there is an inequality in the provision of training and education, and quality of care delivery, in services across England in their response to the Evaluation of Palliative care in England (19th Feb 2026).

We know that in their 2024 'Key Findings' report, NACEL stated that hospital staff in England, Wales and Jersey, who have significantly more consistent and protected access to training than community services, reported only 62% who were delivering palliative and end of life care, had completed relevant training within three years prior to the audit. There is no community version of NACEL at this time.

We know that Care Rights UK, a charitable advocacy group, provided a written statement to the UK Government stating they expressed that residents in care homes, including palliative and those at end of life, are often forgotten. In the same report, Dr Polly Edmonds and Dr Fiona Wiseman (both Palliative Care Consultants in England) were also quoted as saying 'generalist staff in all settings may find caring for people towards the end of their lives stressful, without access to education, training and support from palliative care teams for the more complex patients.'

So what conclusions can we draw?

To be blunt, there is such little data regarding palliative and end of life care in the community that the honest answer is 'we don't know'. Which in my opinion, is more worrying. If we had data to draw from regarding community services palliative and end of life care quality, of either care delivery or training and education, we would have somewhere to jump off from, even if the data had a negative outcome. At present, the most critical data we have is individual services CQC reports which, since Covid and the reduction of inspections over the pandemic, have been racing to catch up on a back log of inspections.

However, what we do know is the current provider of community palliative care education in the UK, Hospices, are under funded and facing financial difficulty. We also know, that there is a prediction of a 21-26% increase in unmet palliative care needs in the UK populous by 2050. We can therefore infer the need for additional services, like SuPORTE, creating opportunities for service improvement, improved care quality and closing the growing gap in unmet palliative and end of life care service provision.