THE head of one of Britain's best known children’s hospices has expressed grave concerns about the life-span of a promised Government cash boost for palliative care services.

The Department of Health announced on Tuesday it is pouring an extra £20million into supportive services for children suffering life-threatening or life-limiting illnesses from 2009 to 2011.

The Government said it wants families to have access to 24-hour community teams and greater choice in whether the patients are treated either at homes or hospices and hospitals, following a damning inquiry last year that found many parents were frustrated by the current system.

However, chief executive of residential chidrens’s hospice Demelza House, in Bobbing near Sittingbourne, Ted Gladdish said that while any extra funding was welcome, families would continue to be let down by the Government’s short-lived finanical committment.

He said: “The money is good news, but the problem is there is never any continuity in this area of care - we don’t know what is going to happen in two years time.

“We, for example, could get a certain amount of funding and use it to employ nurses to work in the community with families.

“The families then start to rely on this much needed support but two years later the Government funding is no longer there, and unless we make as much through donations, we would have to let these members of staff go.

“This is letting the families who really need this level of care down.”

Most hospices offering supportive care for life-limited children, like Demelza House, are run by charities, and rely on a combination of Government funding and public donations.

Mr Gladdish said the reason why funding palliative care for such children was so patchy was because it was not a priority for the health service in comparrison to the high volume of disabled children requiring care.

He said: “In the UK, there are around 700,000 disabled children compared to about 20,000 children with life-limiting illnesses requiring our and other hospices care.

“Also, if Primary Care Trusts and the NHS are not given national targets for palliative care they are measured by, they don’t have to make palliative care a priority.”

However, Mr Gladdish said he believed attitudes would change for the better in the near future.

“To be honest, this problem is going to come more and more to the surface over the next few years. We are in a better place than we were five years ago.

“A lot of important people are getting involved in this issue, and (parliamentary under secretary for health)

Ivan Lewis has really been a champion in trying to get things moving forward.

“Hopefully, the next minister who comes along will be as committed as he is.”