04:34PM, Wednesday 02 December 2015
Children must not be forgotten about in future debates about the direction of health care, a leading charity has warned.
Helen Bennett, director of care at the Alexander Devine Children’s Hospice Service, was speaking at a meeting of the Royal Borough’s Health and Wellbeing Board last night to give an update on efforts to create a children’s palliative care team for Berkshire.
Addressing the board, she said: “I think there’s a real drive for us to focus on adult end-of-life care and it’s important that children don’t get forgotten in that.”
She went on to highlight a lack of health care professionals trained to deal with child end-of-life care, adding ‘there are more children with a life-limiting condition than are accessing the service’.
The board also heard from Chief Inspector Gavin Wong, of Thames Valley Police, (TVP) about plans to pilot a mental health street triage scheme in East Berkshire to provide an out-of-hours ‘rapid response capability’ to assess mental health issues encountered by police.
If approved, the scheme, which would cover Maidenhead, Windsor, Slough and Bracknell Forest, is expected to cost £136,000 a year, with TVP supplying about £57,000.
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