Palliative Care Matters for All: Consultation Paper

1. Introduction

The Scottish Government is committed to ensuring that everyone who needs it can access well-coordinated, timely and high-quality palliative care, care around dying and bereavement support based on what matters to them.

We are seeking views on our draft palliative care strategy ‘Palliative Care Matters for All’. This five-year strategy (2025-2030) builds on our previous palliative care strategies, 'Living and Dying Well: A national action plan for palliative and end of life care in Scotland (2008)' and 'Palliative and end of life care: strategic framework for action (2015)'.

The draft strategy has been developed with the palliative care sector under the principle of co-design, under our shared commitment of ensuring that everyone who needs it can access well-coordinated, timely and high-quality palliative care, care around dying and bereavement support based on what matters to them. The draft strategy has been developed using evidence set out in the additional papers and from listening to those with lived experience.

The draft strategy sets out our aims and intended outcomes, with specific actions for each outcome. Through these outcomes and actions, we expect that adults and children, as well as their families and carers, will have better experiences of palliative care; care when someone is dying; and bereavement support.

We would like to hear what you think about the overall strategy and about what we are planning to change and improve. We will consider all the responses we receive and will use these to inform the final strategy and the delivery plans for each of the actions to be taken forward.

The consultation, draft strategy and supporting documents are available on the below links:

• Palliative Care Strategy: Consultation
• Palliative Care Strategy: Palliative Care Matters for all
• Palliative Care Strategy: Service Mapping Survey: Additional Paper
• Palliative Care Strategy: Lived Experiences and Public Views: Additional Paper
• Palliative Care Strategy: Population Data and Research: Additional Paper
• Palliative Care Strategy: HIS Gathering Views Report

This consultation contains 16 questions across four sections, with space for comments.