NHS TAYSIDE is planning a better future for people with a limited life expectancy due to advanced, incurable disease, writes Marjory Inglis, health reporter.

Health bosses yesterday admitted that terminally ill patients could and should get a better deal than they do at the moment.

They gave their backing to a document that proposes development of palliative care services across the region and the creation of an “intensive symptom control unit” with six in-patient beds at Ninewells Hospital in Dundee.

Plans include demolition of the existing Macmillan day centre at Stracathro Hospital by Brechin and the creation of new facilities at a number of, as yet, unidentified locations across Angus that will provide care closer to people’s own homes.

There is also a desire to replicate the small in-patient hospice at Whitehills Hospital, Forfar, in other areas of Angus.

On the Perth Royal Infirmary site the Macmillan charity is planning to open a 10-bed hospice in the currently derelict Cornhill House in 2009.

All the different planned developments were brought together and given a place in the overall strategy document as the specialist team sought to drive forward improvements and give cohesion to the work going on in different parts of Tayside.

Specialist doctors addressing a meeting of the board of NHS Tayside in Kings Cross Hospital, Dundee, yesterday were given absolute backing for their outline plans and encouraged to go away and be more ambitious in the detailed proposals.

“We only get one chance at end-of-life care,” said non-executive board member Liz Forsyth.

Earlier, Dr Martin Leiper, a palliative care specialist based at hospice Roxburghe House in Dundee, gave a poignant reminder that real people were at the heart of the strategy and that palliative care was not just about looking after cancer patients.

A patient with very advanced lung disease that was causing extreme breathlessness and other problems had been told he was dying. Last November the man said to Dr Leiper “Dying, I can live with that. It’s the symptoms that bother me.”

Repeating the comment yesterday, Dr Leiper said, “This really stopped me in my tracks. He was saying ‘Deal with my symptoms. I will deal with dying when I come to that bit.’ ”

Dr Leiper and colleagues who addressed the board stressed the need to offer people appropriate care that would allow patients and their families to take decisions and have options about where and how they wanted to be cared for towards the end of life.

“I would like people to know that wherever they are in Tayside, whatever time of day or night it was, they could have access to the palliative care service which fits their needs,” said Dr Pam Levack, cancer specialist based at Ninewells.

She said that at the moment it was easy to get in to hospital, but genuinely difficult to get out.

The strategy proposes better opportunities for hospital staff and community staff to work together and improve the planning for patients’ end-of-life care.

Board chairman Peter Bates said almost everyone contributing to the debate had underlined the importance of the strategy. The board was “attaching a very high priority to it.”

The only criticism was that the medical staff drawing up the document had been “a little over cautious.”