APPENDIX 19
Memorandum by New Opportunities Fund (PC
23)
COMMUNITY FUND
1. The Community Fund distributes money
from the National Lottery to projects across the United Kingdom
to help meet the needs of those at greatest disadvantage in society
and to improve the quality of life in communities. To date, the
Community Fund has distributed £2.6 billion to 56,000 charities
and community groups across the United Kingdom. Funding is restricted
to the voluntary and community sector.
2. The Community Fund has funded a significant
number of projects concerned with palliative care, particularly
hospices. While the Fund does not support work which is the responsibility
of the NHS, we have consistently funded other aspects of hospice
work, including capital projects, education, hospice volunteers,
bereavement counselling and respite care, provided by the voluntary
sector. These projects have built on the central role of the voluntary
sector and volunteers in the provision of palliative care, both
in terms of day-to-day hospice management and in wider outreach
work.
3. Since 1995, the Community Fund has made
119 grants totalling more than £29 million to hospices and
related programmes. Examples of some of the projects funded are
given in Annex A.
NEW OPPORTUNITIES
FUND
4. The New Opportunities Fund delivers programmes
to support education, health and environment initiatives across
the UK. Since the Fund's inception in 1999, we have committed
over £3.5 billion to these areas.
5. The Fund's health programmes are very
diverse and cover prevention, detection, treatment and care services
across a range of areas including palliative care. Details of
the Fund's palliative care programmes are set out below, including
an explanation of how they are targeted and what findings our
evaluations have made. Also included are two case studies at Annex
B.
The adult programme
6. The £22 million adults programme
was targeted at areas of the country with the highest palliative
care need. Awards have been made to 55 multi professional teams
to enable them to care for people in their homes. These teams
offer therapeutic, nursing and emotional support and some also
make use of complementary therapies. A number of these projects
will also be extending the availability of care for longer periods
of the day.
The children's programme
7. Seventy awards have been made to home
based care teams to enable them to provide a range of services
to allow children to be cared for at home. Thirty-nine bereavement
teams are helping families who have experienced or will go through
the death of a child. Twenty-five children's hospices have benefited
from grants that will enable them to sustain or develop their
provision. Four-eight million pounds was made available for this
programme.
Timetable for the adult and children programmes
8. Both programmes were launched in March
2002. The maximum grant length was 36 months with an optional
four months lead-in time, so most schemes are expected to be in
operation until 2006-07.
Aims and evaluation
9. The evaluation of the Fund's palliative
care programme began in April 2003, so it is too early to report
interim findings. However, the evaluation of the NOF cancer programme
is further ahead and, since 95% of adult palliative care services
are used by people with cancer and there is some cross-over in
home-based service delivery between cancer and palliative care,
we consider the early cancer findings to be of relevance to the
palliative care programme. Both programmes are aimed at improving
access for groups whose uptake of services has hitherto been limited.
In line with the Fund's overall mission, the programmes aim to
target disadvantaged regions and groups, with particular regard
to BME communities' access to cancer services and children's access
to palliative care services.
10. The cancer and palliative care programmes
will be evaluated by the same partnership from City and Warwick
Universities, ensuring that learning is shared between them. The
cancer evaluation recently produced its first annual report, which
identifies some emerging themes arising from initial case studies.
The evaluation includes projects across England, Scotland, Wales
and Northern Ireland (projects that were wholly for equipment
or capital building were not included in the evaluation). With
an overall aim of improving cancer prevention, detection, treatment
and care, projects focus on homecare, carer support, information
provision and improved access to and awareness of cancer services.
11. Early findings indicate that the Fund's
cancer projects are generally located in areas where there is
high cancer mortality, high mortality from other causes and high
levels of deprivation. New partnerships and collaborations have
developed to deliver cancer services to hard-to-reach groups.
Such new partnerships have encountered some start-up difficulties
and cultural challenges, particularly when they involve voluntary
and statutory organisations working together, but they have also
led to new ways of working, innovative approaches and delivery
of services to marginalised groups. Other projects have been affected
by NHS restructuring and have had some difficulty recruiting and
retaining staff on short contracts. We expect this problem also
to be faced by palliative care teams. Projects are gradually becoming
aware of the wide range of organisations involved in the cancer
field, and NOF is working with them to encourage greater awareness
of cancer networks, particularly as considerations of sustainability
and future funding start to arise.
12. These emerging themes provide NOF with
an assessment of the success of its cancer initiative in meeting
the programme aims and individual project aims and contributing
to NOF's wider mission and values. They will be fed into the development
of the palliative care programme, encouraging linkage between
different organisations and the sharing of good practice.
Sustainability issues
13. The Fund expects schemes to have considered
arrangements to sustain the gains made by projects once their
funding from NOF is complete, and to have begun to develop continuation
funding or exit strategies. The Fund is encouraging all projects
to carry out a self-evaluation; in addition to improving performance
management this will help projects to reflect on their progress
and provide evidence of success to potential funders.
MERGER OF
THE COMMUNITY
FUND AND
NEW OPPORTUNITIES
FUND TO
CREATE A
NEW DISTRIBUTOR
14. The proposal to create a new distributor
is a central part of the Secretary of State's review of the National
Lottery. The National Lottery Funding Decision Document in July
2003 sets out the case for a new distribution body which will
take on the functions of the Community Fund and the New Opportunities
Fund and assume the Millennium Commission's ability to support
large scale regenerative projects, as well as taking a wider responsibility
for leading on a range of Lottery issues on behalf of all Lottery
distributors.
15. The intention is that the two organisations
will merge administratively in May 2004, in preparation for legislation
which defines the powers of the new distributor and establishes
it as a legal entity.
February 2004
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