IHF to fund children’s hospice home care service

THE Irish Hospice Foundation is to spend more than €2.5m on developing a children’s hospice home care service over the next five years.

It will fund Ireland’s first children’s palliative care consultant and five outreach nurses in the community at a cost of around €500,000 a year.

The Health Service Executive and the Department of Health and Children has agreed to appoint eight outreach nurses to support home care.

Three of the nurses will be funded initially by the HSE at a cost of around €200,000 in a full year and five will be 100% funded by the IHF for three years and partially funded for a further three.

The IHF has agreed to fully fund the consultant’s post for five years. The Dublin-based consultant will support all clinicians providing palliative care to children and provide leadership and support to the outreach nurses.

The development is in response to the main recommendations of a national policy document – Palliative Care for Children with Life Limiting Conditions.

Minister of State for Children Barry Andrews, who launched the document yesterday, said it was aimed at supporting families caring for a child with a life-limiting condition at home. Around 1,400 children are living with a life-limiting condition and around 500 childhood deaths occur each year.

“I believe that this policy will impact positively on the quality of life of these children and their families and that we will no longer have families feeling isolated and abandoned but supported and cared for.”

IHF chief executive Eugene Murray said they would be providing around €500,000 a year over a five-year period.

Mr Murray said the development of a hospice home care service for children would not have happened if the IHF had not become involved.

“We presented a scenario to the Government where they would step in when we step out and they have agreed to that. So we can only take that at face value,” he said.

Nevertheless, he believed the service would continue to be funded by the HSE because of the difficulties of removing such a basic support for families who needed it.