00:00The elephant in the room here, and I put this directly to Wes Streeting and Keir Starmer, is this.
00:09What on earth are you doing, being the Prime Minister and the Health Secretary,
00:15who may oversee a state-funded assisted dying service,
00:21while acknowledging that some people are choosing to die or want to die
00:28because palliative care isn't there for them?
00:31How can you, your legacy as Prime Minister and Health Secretary,
00:37be making it easier for people to die while not funding the care that could make life worth living?
00:44I think that's a disgrace. If that was my legacy, I'd be ashamed for the rest of my political life.
00:50It's hard to emphasise enough how threadbare and patchy and a kind of Cinderella service
00:57palliative care is in the UK today.
01:00The majority of it isn't even funded by the NHS, it's funded by charities.
01:06And it means things like hospices in deficit having to close their beds
01:12because they can't afford to employ nurses.
01:15Or in hospitals, such as my hospital, we don't even have a seven-day palliative care service.
01:22At weekends, for two days every week, you get no palliative care nurses, no palliative care doctors.
01:30And that's a national scandal.
01:32We should be providing proper palliative care for everybody who's facing the end of their life,
01:39not leave it up to a postcode lottery.
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