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Professor Bee Wee, NHS England’s National Clinical Director for End of Life Care, told Expo delegates that improving choice and quality of services for patients coming to the end of their lives is everyone’s business.

Responding to a challenging talk – Transforming end of life care: why we can’t afford not to – from Dr Katherine Sleeman, NIHR Clinician Scientist and Honorary Consultant in palliative medicine at the Cicely Saunders Institute of Palliative Care, Professor Wee agreed that all health professionals in the NHS have a role to play in ensuring that people and their loved ones are supported – with every encounter with a professional mattering.

Jane Collins, chief executive of Marie Curie, and Simon Pearce, end of life care lead at the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services, completed the panel, which discussed the key barriers which persist in palliative and end of life, such as professionals being trained and supported to have potentially difficult conversations with patients about end of life care planning – not just of health and care requirements, but also personal and spiritual needs and ambitions.

In her opening speech, which was previewed in a blog earlier today, Dr Sleeman set out how – with projected rising death rates – she believes that the NHS needs a transformative shift in how it provides palliative and end of life care, comparable to the beginning of the hospice movement 50 years ago.

Getting end of life care right, she argued, both improves outcomes and experience for patients, as well as driving efficiency for the NHS as the costs of failing to address people’s needs early – such as emergency admissions – are reduced.

As part of the Q&A with delegates, the panel discussed how that can be achieved, with new technology and data management, and greater partnership working between health and social care, including through end of life care being part of Sustainability and Transformation Plans, identified as key means by which improvements for patients can be made in the coming years.

Professor Wee and the other panellists also took the opportunity to remind attendees of the Ambitions for Palliative and End of Life Care: A national framework for local action 2015-2020, published last year by a wide-ranging partnership of 27 voluntary, statutory and professional organisations, including NHS England.

Ambitions builds on the achievements of the first national end of life care strategy of 2008, providing a statement of what good looks like from the person’s perspective, and how local NHS and social care commissioners can achieve it in their area.

As Dr Sleeman said, “if we can’t get this right, we won’t get the rest right”, and the panellists were clear that meeting the needs of the rising numbers of people who will pass away every year, the kind of collaboration which produced the Ambitionsframework will need to be replicated across England.