Increasingly care homes and care at home services are providing end of life care. Two thirds of independent sector social care services say they dealt with more clients needing palliative care last year than the year before. The trend is likely to continue.

A new report from Scottish Care points out that it touches nearly every worker – last year 85 per cent of care staff were involved in providing for people at the end of life.

But research revealed more than a quarter (28 per cent) of the organisations participating in a survey admitted they couldn’t do such work to their own satisfaction. Staff training isn’t always adequate and the funding and the time available often aren’t either.

Good palliative care can’t be done on the cheap. Of course those who care for us at the end of our life should be properly trained and supported. We would want that for ourselves, we would want it for our loved ones.

But it isn’t just special pleading when the industry body for independent care homes claims that we are currently “failing workers and therefore failing those they care for.”

You only have to look at the closure of 12 care homes for the elderly, announced last week Bield Housing and Care, to realise that if even a charity can’t make the economics of residential care work, there is little slack in the system. Care at home, with its harassed workers trying to do too much in appointments which are too short and have too little travel time factored in, is equally challenging.

If social care services – in the public or private sector – are increasingly to be there for people in their final days, we need to resource them properly. The Scottish Government has sunk millions of pounds into a Palliative Care Framework to ensure everyone who needs it has access to good palliative care. But are the resources on offer enough for it to be a success?

A University of Edinburgh nursing student, Ellie Jolly had one of the most striking contributions to make at the Scottish Care event. Her hugely moving poem Annie forms part of a booklet of writing about end of life care “This Speaks to Me” which was published alongside the conference.

“The professional code states, that we’re not meant to me friends, But I’ve looked after you for weeks, and now we’ve reached the end,” she wrote of Annie, her first experience of palliative care. “I’ve sat with many others now, Given them comfort by being there, But the room still goes cold each time, As if it’s suddenly all bare.”

A few couplets can’t do it justice, and I urge you to look it up online. But the poem clearly shows the value of experience, listening, care and particularly time which go into quality end of life support.

“We only get one chance at the end of someone’s life and we need to start getting it right”, said Gillian Sherwood of the Prince and Princess of Wales Hospice.

Yet 58 per cent of care organisations say they can’t even provide their staff with bereavement training. That can’t be right and it has to change.