Opinion: Time the NHS coughed up for hospices

By John Knight, Third Sector, 30 April 2008

Dame Cicely Saunders set up St Christopher's Hospice, the world's first purpose-built hospice, in 1967. St Christopher's was founded on the principles of combining expert pain and symptom relief with wider social and spiritual care to patients and their families and friends.

Since then, the hospice movement has grown significantly. But funding for hospice care varies dramatically and contentiously, from majority funding from the NHS to almost 100 per cent funding by charities. The charitable provenance of hospices stretches back as far as the fourth century, when they were places of rest...