Proposition 52K1675

Projet de loi modifiant la loi relative à l'assurance obligatoire soins de santé et indemnités, coordonnée le 14 juillet 1994, en vue de l'agrément et du financement des équipes de soins palliatifs à domicile pour enfants.

General information ¶

Submitted by

The Senate

Submission date

June 19, 2008

Official page

Visit

Status

Adopted

Requirement

Simple

Subjects

child palliative care paediatrics home care health insurance

Voting ¶

Voted to adopt

Groen CD&V Vooruit Ecolo LE PS | SP Open Vld N-VA LDD MR FN VB

Contact form ¶

Do you have a question or request regarding this proposition? Select the most appropriate option for your request and I will get back to you shortly.

Discussion ¶

March 5, 2009 | Plenary session (Chamber of representatives)

Full source

The Committee on Public Health discussed this bill and this bill at its meeting on 10 February last year. Both the draft and the proposal aim to provide for structural funding for palliative care teams for children. This funding should be provided by the end of this year. The draft, which was previously unanimously approved in the Senate, was also unanimously adopted in our committee.

Ms Detiège has the word in the general discussion.

I am pleased that today a major bill will be approved by the House. The draft law ensures that palliative home care for children will be structurally subsidised. So far, home care teams depended on project subsidies and donations. Belgium has been the leader in its offer of palliative care for children for years, but our initiatives were only in the grace of support for good causes.

Government aid is finally guaranteed. I would like to remind everyone that the bill that is approved today was initially a bicameral proposal. It is a parliamentary initiative, with Myriam Vanlerberghe and Marleen Temmerman as chief ministers in the Senate, and myself, as chief minister in the Chamber. For one time, the Senate worked faster than the Chamber. With my sp.a. colleagues as the driving force, the initiative was unanimously adopted in the Senate.

Given the importance of the proposal – the draft law, in fact, aims at implementing structural financing by KB by 31 December 2009 – I, together with my colleagues and co-contributors, backed the draft law. In fact, the bill is identical to the bill of mine, Ms Katia della Faille, Mia De Schamphelaere, Yvan Mayeur and Marie-Martine Schyns. The adoption of our bill would delay the procedure for obtaining structural funding. The reason for this is that our institute works complexly and the proposal should be returned to the Senate for discussion again.

I am very pleased that there was no doubt in the Chamber Committee that the proposal represents a significant progress for palliative care in our country. From today on, the teams responsible for the home care projects – the first initiative exists since the 1980s – know that they no longer need to rely on support for charities and pens. This is a good thing as the existing teams can present good results. Three out of four terminally ill children, who are accompanied, for example, by the Leuven and Ghent teams, die at home rather than in the hospital. The teams accompany care providers, the patients themselves and the parents.

They also provide for the provision and lending of specific medical supplies that are not in stock in the pharmacy or for example the loan services of the health fund. They also provide special antidecubitus mattresses for children, customized respiratory agents, and so on.

These teams are finally given the certainty that they will be financially supported. I would therefore like to thank my colleagues, and of course also Minister Onkelinx, for supporting this initiative.

Mrs. Speaker, Mr. Minister, colleagues, of course, we support the bill, which was originally a bill in the Senate and has become a bill, ⁇ because it is about palliative care, which will always take away our interest and will continue to carry away, which is essential.

All I want to say about this is that, of course, we must be careful not to get too much into a target group policy and not to do too many small things that then sometimes give rise to too complex regulations because they are too much focused on one particular group, but we support it and we will continue to support it.

I would like to make a call to continue working on this, preferably room-wide. There are several articles in the committee on palliative care. We should succeed in reaching a single large text that can be carried by the different groups, so that from Parliament we can make a call to the executive power, to the government. This would therefore be a bit in the implementation of the evaluation plan that has been drawn up by the evaluation cell Palliative Care. It calls for more resources in various areas, both for home care and for intramural palliative care. As long as there is a step plan, as long as there is a financial plan, maybe a multi-year plan, which is established so that we know where we are coming from, we can then systematically continue to work on a better development of palliative care.

In that sense, I would like to make a few remarks, but of course we will support the proposal.

Mrs. Speaker, colleagues, of course, the Flemish Belang Group will also support the present bill. We will, of course, take the same stance as we took in the committee.

I take with satisfaction note of the position of my good CD&V colleague Luc Goutry. He announces that we will soon be working on a House-wide resolution proposal. I hope that this can indeed happen in Chamberbreed and that the little game will not be played.

We therefore hope that the fact that the first item on the agenda is a proposal for a resolution because of the Flemish Interest with regard to palliative concerns, will not be a barrier to the fact that everyone has been won to make work from the sector concerned.

I hope that the treatment can be done across the room. The sector is too important – we all agree on this – to play small, political games around the subject in question.

Of course, we will adopt the proposal, as it is now presented, as a first step in the right direction. Nevertheless, we want to go much further in the coming weeks than what is predicted here now.