Laura Lucchesi: Everyone deserves a good death - this is how hospice care makes it possible

Author: Laura Lucchesi, Clinical Paramedic Specialist

It’s Hospice Care Week. It’s hard to believe that in 2026, 1 in 3 people in the UK won’t be able to access the palliative and end-of-life care they need. It’s even more bonkers to me that hospices are charities. There is some funding from the NHS, but most of the money needed to run these vital services comes from donations from the public.

I work as a Clinical Paramedic Specialist in the outreach service at Hospice in the Weald in Pembury. Let me take you through a little of what my job involves.

I have a caseload of patients I care for — my “gang” — ranging in age from their 20s to over 100. They have various conditions: cancer, MND, frailty, end-stage heart disease, COPD, organ failure and other life-limiting illnesses.

On an average day I’ll be supporting my patients over the phone or visiting them at home. We rotate the role of duty clinician, so on some days I’m responsible for the clinical enquiries that come in from across the service. We support not only our patients, but their families too.

We are a light in the dark. We make calm from chaos. We try to make the scary and unknown less terrifying. We try to prepare people for what happens at the end of life, because good end-of-life care starts with a conversation.

It’s not a conversation anyone particularly wants to have. Yet when everyone knows the plan, those incredibly difficult decisions can become a little easier when the time comes.

My job is to unpick the physical from the psychological and to treat both. To allay fears and reassure people. To help them work out what’s important to them and to make that a priority in my planning and, eventually, to get them as comfortable as I possibly can for their death.

If I’ve done my job well, when that time comes everyone will know what’s happening. We’ll have talked about it. We’ll have made a plan. My patient and the people who love them will be as ready as anyone can be for something none of us has done before.

A good death shouldn’t be a matter of chance. We have one opportunity to get it right. Plan early, as hard as that can be. Talk about what matters to you. Tell the people you love what you want. Trust the people who are there to care for you.

Hospice care isn’t about giving up on life. It’s about helping someone live as well as they possibly can for as long as they possibly can — and then, when the time comes, helping them die as well as they possibly can too. That shouldn’t depend on luck.