By Alexandra Smith and Michael McGowan
The state’s local health districts will be forced to reduce their planned spending on palliative care after the NSW Labor government cut the budget for end-of-life care by $150 million.
The cuts, contained in the June budget, were last week detailed to local health districts, with one large Sydney district told its palliative care funding would be reduced by 30 per cent.
Correspondence sent to that health district on Friday, and seen by the Herald, reveals that it would receive $11.67 million over four years, down from the $34.2 million budgeted under the Coalition.
A palliative care doctor has warned that there is “depression” about cuts to funding for end-of-life care. Credit: Getty
In its final budget, the Coalition committed an additional $743 million for palliative care for an extra 600 nurses, allied health professionals, doctors and support staff and to boost hospital capacity.
However, on Wednesday, Premier Chris Minns acknowledged that some of that money had to be redirected to boost the broader nursing workforce. Despite this, he said the government was still increasing palliative care funding each year.
“I’ve got to say ... the biggest impediment that we had rolling out that investment, that $740 million, investment was the human capital, the nurses,” Minns told budget estimates.
“The money needed to go to recruiting nurses, many of whom will be working in palliative care.”
The palliative care spend will be reduced from $1.85 billion over four years to $1.7 billion.
Former premier Dominic Perrottet announced the additional funding for palliative care during a debate over the introduction of voluntary assisted dying in the last parliament. Those laws come into effect on November 28.
At the time, Perrottet – who voted against euthanasia – admitted he had failed to fund end-of-life care adequately and vowed to fix it.
On Thursday, retired palliative care physician Dr Philip Lee said there was “depression” among local health services at the decision to cut the extra funding, saying it would mean plans to recruit extra palliative staff would have to be paused or appointments cancelled.
“I think there’s a lot of uncertainty about what’s happening and one example of that is that the understanding was that if you appointed someone to a particular role of recurrent funding, so it was a permanent appointment,” he said.
“My understanding now is that that’s not the case. But when you advertise the position, it is for a set period of time. And for those who have worked in healthcare, you are very reluctant to apply for a position that’s only going to be a contract for one or two years.”
He queried whether it would lead to more referrals to voluntary assisted dying because there would be “more patients whose palliative care need are not met”.
Earlier this month the Labor upper house backbencher Greg Donnelly broke ranks with his party to criticise the government to express his “enormous disappointment and disbelief” at what he called an “enormous” cut to palliative care funding.
Despite Minns admitting the funding had been redirected, NSW Health Minister Ryan Park on Thursday refused to concede there had been a cut.
The Coalition’s health spokesman Matt Kean called the decision “unacceptable” and urged the Minns government to reinstate the funding.
“Greg Donnelly has condemned this funding cut. Yesterday Chris Minns tried to justify the funding cut, and today the health minister is trying to pretend that there was no funding cut. This government doesn’t know what it’s doing,” Kean said.
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