Date published: 10 April 2024 by Katie Inglis

Rainbow Trust welcomes the report from Together for Short Lives, Short Lives Can’t Wait: The State of Children’s Palliative Care, which highlights the desperate postcode lottery of care families can face at the end of their child’s life.

Families with seriously ill children should not have to face such uncertainty at the most traumatic of times and this must be addressed because more and more families with seriously ill children are in need of support.

The number of families caring for a seriously ill child referred to Rainbow Trust more than doubled between January and March this year across the charity’s nine Care Teams in England and yet we still receive no central Government funding: instead we are reliant entirely on the generosity of the public for donations.

No Government funding for Rainbow Trust Family Support Workers to provide these families with the vital practical and emotional support at home, in hospital and in the community, that they need, whenever and wherever it is needed.

We are the one constant in these families’ lives, providing social palliative care, the essential support that a family needs alongside medical care to face each day as it comes. We bridge the gap across all settings by bringing together the services needed by these families from hospitals, at home, in schools and the wider community, to ensure no family faces serious childhood illness alone.

Families need a voice, as highlighted in the Short Lives Can’t Wait report. Please help them by reading the report and signing the letter to the Prime Minister.