Last week I attended several Macmillan Coffee Mornings, as part of my intensive Autumn series of visits and open surgeries throughout the constituency. It was lovely to meet such great people involved, and I can testify to some truly excellent baking skills on show throughout the visits, which
I will carefully have to balance with salads and energetic canvassing over the coming years.
Special mention must go to a meringue in Hinton St George - you know who you are!
Raising money and profile for the great work that Macmillan nurses do, including with the terminally ill and those coping with difficult diagnoses, is a very worthwhile endeavour, and it was superb to see the support for that throughout our towns and villages.
Palliative care has improved dramatically over the past few decades, but there is more to do to ensure that people get access to consistent, high quality care and treatments in the final parts of their lives.
Macmillan and other charities make an extraordinary contribution, but access to palliative care, which in the modern world is capable of alleviating many of the more distressing experiences if practised well, and will I hope improve further in the future, should not depend on being close to facilities that are good at independent charitable fund raising.
The integration of health and social care in Somerset, which I have been keen to support, gives an opportunity to address some of the anomalies and try to make services more focused on the holistic needs of patients. It is an opportunity to make sure that our system doesn't allow failures to look after older people, in particular, such as seen over recent years in Liverpool and Mid Staffs.
The fact is that the population over 65 years of age will double in the next couple of decades, and this means that we have to get better at delivering high quality care for older people. I am keen to help local charities with their work in this area but I am keen also to make sure that our NHS integrates well with them and helps to deliver the quality and scale of services required.
Too many people worry about their last stages of life, and it is of course one of the great human challenges not to do so. Medicine, philosophy, religion, empathy and self sacrifice: all play their part for different people in making this essential part of the human condition bearable, and capable of inspiring.
Yeovil College and Yeovil District Hospital have recently proposed a new health and care industry college, to be sited in Yeovil. This is a very exciting development, especially as our local facilities have struggled of late to recruit suitably qualified staff. It is one that I hope all the local agencies can get behind.
I am happy to do what I can to support this plan, as the more we can broaden and deepen the skills that can be developed locally, the better for our local services, our economy and our people.
While the national finances remain challenging and we are by no means out of the woods when it comes to deficit reduction and starting to get the national debt down, the Government is committed to increasing health funding, and determined to strengthen our economy to pay for it. The way we make sure this helps people in the last stages of life is one of the great challenges of our age.