A Hospice for Children in England

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Abstract
Despite enormous advances toward complete cure of many of the previously fatal illnesses of childhood, modern medicine remains unable to help a small but important minority of children. In cases of malignant disease, failure to respond to curative treatment may lead quickly to a terminal phase of illness, while at another extreme, the long-term degenerative illnesses may cause a child to deteriorate mentally and physically for up to two decades before an inevitably fatal outcome. During the last 30 years, the hospice movement had had great success in providing continuing care and symptom relief for incurably ill adults.1 More recent work has demonstrated that similar principles of care can be used to help relieve the distress of dying children2,3 whereas a hospice setting has been suggested in order to allow humane natural death for malformed and extremely premature neonates.4

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