THERE have been reports since the beginning of this year of a looming crisis in funding for hospices. BBC News reported last week that five hospices had planned to cut jobs, including clinical posts, in the past two months.

Hospices are charities, and about one third of their funding comes from local health boards. As salaries and costs have risen, this state funding has not increased.

It is worth remembering that the hospice movement was founded by Dame Cicely Saunders as a reaction to the shortage of good palliative care in hospitals. She initiated a new approach to the relief of pain, along with emotional and spiritual support for the dying and their families. She recognised that secularisation had led to an unhealthy denial of death, which had led, too often, to terminally ill patients’ being seen as medical “failures”. It was as a Christian and as a doctor that Dame Cicely challenged this, promoting a better way.

We now have an atheist Prime Minister who has promised to give parliamentary time to a Private Member’s Bill to legalise assisted dying, should one be tabled (News, 26 January). If this goes through, it may become harder than ever for hospices to claim state funding. Terminally ill patients are among these expected to request assisted dying, and, if this becomes normative in a culture in which “taking control” — in death as in life — is the highest secular virtue, it is hard to see how hospice care can be justified.

Those who care for hospice patients have intimate knowledge of the dying process. They know how to support people who are having to deal with the giving up of personal control in their final weeks and days. Many enter consciously into a profound letting go, experiencing personal transformation that can include finding space to forgive past wrongs, and, sometimes, to experience gratitude and wonder.

The Christian view of death as a transition from the sorrows of this life to the vision of eternal life is upheld in good palliative care. Many, though not all, of those who work in hospices oppose assisted dying, because they believe that it robs people of that chance to make a “holy” death, whatever their faith, or lack of it. They also fear that assisted dying will mean that people feel pressured to end their lives prematurely.

The secularisation of death is already far advanced in our society, along with the reframing of funerals as celebrations of life, and the omission of expressions of grief, sorrow, or hope. From a secular perspective, death cannot be anything other than a void. Hospices, with their Christian origins, testify to the gospel alternative: that there is meaning in inevitable ending.

Christians who care about our mission to the nation as a whole should press for the State’s continued investment in hospice care — and offer as much charitable support as they can.