Category: Hospice News

Here at St Barnabas Hospice we are paying close attention to advice on Covid19 from the Government and Public Health and will take measures to protect the best interests of everyone in our care. Our patients and their families remain at the heart of what we do, and we will ensure that our Hospice care will continue in the safest way, which means changes to our current visiting guidelines, staff, volunteering and fundraising events.

A message for our patients and their families and anyone needing to access our care,         

Firstly, be assured that we are still here, caring in the community. Our clinical team are as dedicated as ever to provide palliative care throughout this unsettling time and we do not want you to hesitate in contacting us for support. Our Inpatient Unit and Hospice at Home teams are all working to care for people around the county and will continue to do so, whether this be home visits, telephone support or Inpatient care in Lincoln. The Hospice in the Hospital in Grantham has paused its visiting, in line with other Hospital visiting hours.

Due to the current Coronavirus situation we have, sadly, had to take the decision not to allow visitors to most of our patients, within the Inpatient Unit

We appreciate this is likely to cause some distress however, please understand we have a duty of care to keep our patients, their families and staff as safe as possible. We are aiming to contact our patients families on a daily basis with updates regarding their loved ones wellbeing and pass on any messages.

Be assured, for those patients at end of life, immediate family (or next of kin) will be able to visit. Our Nursing staff will discuss this with family members on how this can be facilitated in the safest way.

Thank you for your understanding and co-operation in these unprecedented circumstances.

To self-refer please contact us our Palliative Care Co-Ordination Centre 0300 020 0694

We have made the decision to temporarily close our smaller sites to the public. Please be assured that this will not impact on our Hospice at Home or Inpatient care, but following Government Guidelines is in the best interest of our patients and our staff.

These sites are as follows:
• Grantham
• Louth
• Boston
• Spalding
• Gainsborough

In addition, we have taken the step to close our Bereavement Groups but will continue to offer telephone support. If you have any questions about this, please contact our Wellbeing team directly on 01522 518 246

Visitors and supporters

We are currently following guidance from Public Health England but also taking additional measures to protect the health and wellbeing of patients and families. It is with great sadness we have had to make the decision to cancel all fundraising events for the Hospice until further notice. This includes the Colour Dash, Ladies Lunch, Plant Sales, Coffee Mornings, Gin and Jammies Networking,and a number of Challenge events. Although we understand this is disappointing, this is in the best interest of our patients and their families, staff, volunteers and of course, you our supporters and in line with Government guidelines.

We are pleased to announce our Display at Doddington Hall for our Dragonfly Appeal has been rescheduled for September. This will give you a chance to see the display, outdoors and following social distancing measures. For more information visit the events page here.

If you have your own fundraising activity or have signed up to an events please contact our Fundraising Team via email fundraising@stbarnabashospice.co.uk and we will be pleased to offer support as best we can.

Shops

We are delighted to announce a phased opening for our Shops. This will begin with a ‘Donation Drive-Thru’ event, in which you can book a slot to donate your items safely and at distance at our main warehouse. To book your slot visit the Donation Drive Thru event.  Currently, this is the ONLY way to donate your goods and you must book a free slot to attend.

Our Birchwood Shop will open on Monday 6th July, followed by The Forum (North Hykeham) and Wragby Road (Lincoln) on Monday 13th July.

Our Lottery team will continue to run, as normal. This again, will be reviewed on a day to day basis.

Volunteers        

We are following guidelines about vulnerable, at risk groups and have made the decision to put on hold our Volunteering roles temporarily who we feel are at risk for everyone’s safety and wellbeing.

If you have any questions or concerns please contact Steve Bond, Volunteer Service Manager on 01522 518232

Thank you for your incredible flexibility and outstanding support during this time.  You really are an extraordinary group of people.

Staff    

Our valued staff are paramount to the continuing of our service and we are taking all necessary measures to ensure that we can deliver this safely and with minimal disruption throughout this period. Our Clinical team will continue, as stated above to work with our patients to offer the best care and our non-clinical team are being asked to work flexibly to support the delivery of our service – wherever that is needed.

We would like to thank our staff for their tireless commitment to the charity and for doing all they can to minimise infection and keep our services going at this time.

Finally, we have seen an unsurprising decline in donations, and event sign ups due to the impact of Coronavirus. We believe the impact on our income to offer free end-of-life care to be significant. Our patients are some of the most vulnerable in the county and we would welcome any support or donation you can give.

Donate now… https://stbarnabashospice.co.uk/get-involved/donate/

Useful Links

We will add useful links for those needing support below:

Lincolnshire coronavirus support

Getting coronavirus support as a vulnerable person

Support line for older people

Coronavirus information for those affected by dementia

“We have an Acer tree in our garden for Dawn, which helps us feel close to her. This is where our dragonfly will be going, so it can watch over Dawn for us when we’re not there. It’s so important for us to keep her memory alive and celebrate everything that she was. She was my world and I miss her every single day. I see so much of her in Sophie and that is what keeps me going.”

I write to tell you about a very special chance to remember a loved one with an ironwork dragonfly and the amazing support this can provide to a family like mine.  Like you I have lost someone close to me, my wife Dawn to terminal cancer.

Dawn and myself were just a normal family when she got ill.  We had our 7 year old daughter Sophie, Deefor our black Labrador and a fantastic trip to Disneyland Florida planned.  It was while we were away on our dream holiday that Dawn started to get really poorly.  We thought it was just a stomach bug and it was only when we got back and she went into hospital that we realised it was serious.

Two weeks after Florida we were given the shattering news that Dawn had stage 4 cancer.  A few weeks later we found out her cancer had spread and she only had months to live.

It was such a hard time for us all.  Dawn was in agonising pain and we were all trying to come to terms with her illness.  Three days after we found out that Dawn was going to die she went into St Barnabas Hospices In Patient Unit.  She was only supposed to be in there for a few days for pain management but spent 3 weeks there and eventually died in the hospice.

The time that she was in there helped us all immensely.  St Barnabas don’t just look out for the patient they make it about the wider family. Just the week before she died we had our 6^th wedding anniversary and they let me take the dog up to see her and take a bottle of prosecco in.  It made such a difference.  While she was in there Dawn was able to make a bear and memory box for Sophie so that she has memories of her mum.  I also remember our last meal together was fish and chips on her bed on the Friday.  She died on the Monday.  Just little things like that made all the difference.

After Dawn died a wonderful lady gave us books with stories to help me and Sophie talk about what had happened.  This included the Dragonfly story and we read one a night for a week.  It was so useful for the two of us to be able to relate the stories back to what had happened to us.

This spring St Barnabas Hospice are inviting people like you and me to donate for an ironwork dragonfly in memory of loved ones.  Your donation will go onto continue the incredible care that we received as a family.  For £34.19 you could get your very own Dragonfly in memory of someone special to you.

All Dragonflies will go into a special display at Doddington Hall from Saturday 4^th April until Sunday 19^th April as a tribute to those people being remembered.  After this people will be invited to pick up their dragonflies either from the display or from various locations to take home and keep in their gardens.  In addition, there will be exclusive twilight sessions held at Doddington Hall so you can see the display come to life.  Please see overleaf for further details.

Your donation for a dragonfly could be the kindness, care and respect that me and my family received.  Following Dawn’s death I was sinking and accessed further support from the hospice by going for group and individual counselling.  This helped me hugely.  Being within a group gives you different ideas about how to cope or it helps put your mind at rest if you are beating yourself up over something.

Sophie was very lucky to be able to access counselling through her school.  But at the moment there isn’t anything like that in our area for children.  I’ve noticed that children suffer loss in such a different way to adults.  Usually its their first experience of losing someone close and so they rely on adults to guide them through this.

Later on this year St Barnabas will start to offer child bereavement groups and sessions to people in Lincolnshire.  This means that children like Sophie can access specialist support to be able to talk about their experiences and their loss.  Your dragonfly could be a part of making this happen for a young person or child.

I do hope you can join me in having a dragonfly to remember someone. I urge you to fill in the enclosed form if you do.  There are only 1000 dragonflies available to go into the display and an additional 500 to order for collection in June so please order yours today and help care for a family like mine.

Thank you for taking the time to read our story.

Yours Sincerely

 

 

Neil Buck
Loving husband and father.  

“I think people perhaps think to fundraise you’ve got to shave your hair or wax your legs or do something very publicly, but you can do things quite quietly and in a solitary way and do some good for people. That’s what I’m trying to do.”

The beauty of fundraising for St Barnabas is that however you choose to do it, you are making a positive difference for those in your local community; work to your strengths and turn the things you enjoy into a method of fundraising. This is exactly what Sue Dewsbury has done, and she has raised over £10,000 for St Barnabas in the process!

Sue is an embroidery designer and creator of the “Engineered in Stitches” Facebook page. Sue designs patterns for machine embroidery and shares her designs and instructions on her page in return for a donation to St Barnabas.

Sue decided to fundraise after her friend received end of life care with us.

She said: “The care at St Barnabas was so wonderful for my friend. Her family told me that she’d wanted me to have all her fabric after she died. So I collected all of this fabric and I thought “well I’ll carry on doing my designs and I’ll try and find a way to sell them so that St Barnabas can benefit from the money.”

Not only has the Engineered in Stitches Facebook page raised thousands, it has also raised awareness of the Hospice all over the world!

Sue said: “I’ve made friends through the Facebook group from all over the world and they’re just wonderful people who like my designs but also want to support St Barnabas. St Barnabas now has supporters from New Zealand, Australia, India, Hawaii and lots in America and Canada.”

We would like to say a big thank you to Sue for all of the hard work she selflessly puts into her designs for the benefit of the Hospice. The donations resulting from her designs has so far funded over 500 hours of essential Hospice at Home care!

If you have a skill that you think could help to raise money for the Hospice, give our fundraising office a call on 01522 540 300

 

St Barnabas Hospice Tree-cycle service has collected over 1,600 Christmas trees to help fund end-of-life care.

Now in its fifth year, the St Barnabas Hospice Tree-cycle has been a huge success. Over 1,600 trees were collected, raising £27,000 for the Hospice. This is a whopping 36.5 times the amount that their first ever Tree-cycle raised five years ago, making it their most successful Tree-cycle to date.

From Saturday 11^th January, St Barnabas staff joined forces with some wonderful volunteers from local businesses and the community to collect the trees and recycle them for wood chippings.

Particular thanks go to Enterprise Rent-a-Car, Lincolnshire Coop, Gelder Group, OSB Events, Wallbreaker, Delta-Simons, Hurst Arb, Continental Landscapes, Simpson Arboriculture, Manor Farm Tree Services, KWP Plant Hire, Bytham Trees, Sam Trimmer Tree Services, Arborez, Downtown Garden Centre, Stamford 2^nd Scouts, Inspire+, Anwick Garden Centre, Nunton Christmas Trees, Fillingham Christmas Trees and Doddington Hall.

Recycled trees are turned into wood chippings that can be used in multiple ways. Wood chippings can be used for biomass boilers, which heat many Lincolnshire homes. They can also provide shelter and layering for farmyard animals and in some cases can be turned into BBQ charcoal which is then sold from local farms.

Melissa Gaffney, Event Fundraiser at St Barnabas Hospice, said:

“Thanks to support from the local community, the 2020 Tree-cycle has been the most successful to date, beating last year’s total by over £13,000 We couldn’t have achieved this level of success without the wonderful local businesses who have donated their time, equipment and expertise to the campaign.

“I’d also like to thank members of the public who came forward to volunteer their time and help us collect Christmas trees. Their support has been hugely valuable and has meant that we could extend our collection locations further across Lincolnshire.”

The money raised from this year’s Tree-cycle will have a huge impact on the care St Barnabas delivers to people across Lincolnshire living with a life-limiting or terminal illness and their families and carers.

Just as an example, £27,000 could fund 2,150 three-course meals and warm blankets for patients, 1,055 mouth care kits to relieve discomfort, or 526 bereavement support sessions.

St Barnabas has lots of exciting new ways to fundraise planned for 2020 – the next being Gin and Jammies. Gin and Jammies means supporters can drink gin with their friends, in the comfort of their own home, in their ‘jammies’, all whilst fundraising for the Hospice. To find out more, visit www.stbarnabashospice.co.uk/ginandjammies.

St Barnabas Hospice is teaming up with charities and individuals across the UK to raise awareness of grief throughout National Grief Awareness Week.

Spearheaded by The Good Grief Trust, the UK’s first National Grief Awareness Week will run from Monday 2^nd December to Sunday 8^th December. The goal is to offer a toolkit of support to those coping with bereavement, as well as helping others know what to say and do to help those grieving.

The impact of grief can be devastating and can last a lifetime. To put this into perspective, the current death figures for the UK are:

• One person dies every minute.
• A parent dies every 22 minutes, leaving behind 41,000 dependent children.
• That equals 112 newly bereaved children every day.
• 1 in 29 children have lost a parent – roughly one child per classroom.
• There are 21 child deaths each day.
• 90% of young offenders have had an average of 6 bereavements by the age of 18.

St Barnabas Hospice has a bereavement service which provides free support to anyone in Lincolnshire who is bereaved. The Hospice supports all adults, regardless of whether their loved one received hospice care or not.

Tracy Tuffs, Counselling Service Team Lead at St Barnabas Hospice, said:

“We have a team of dedicated staff and volunteers who work tirelessly to support people across Lincolnshire. In total, we have 37 trained counsellors, 18 supportive listeners and 39 volunteer group coordinators.

“Grief comes in many forms, and no two people’s grief is ever the same. There isn’t a time limit on grieving and we recognise that our support must be tailored to each individual. This is why we have options for people to attend one-to-one counselling, bereavement groups, supportive listening sessions and even follow-on friendship groups for those who have moved past the early stages of grief.”

Former Grange Hill actress, Linda Magistris, founded The Good Grief Trust in 2016 following the death of her partner. Linda said:

“Every year an average of 530,000 people die in the UK, with many more family, friends and colleagues left to grieve, often alone. We will all be affected by a bereavement sometime in our lives, yet we still find it hard to talk about our grief.”

Patrons of the week include former cricketer Phil Tufnell, former pop singer Shirlie Kemp (Holliman), actor and director Todd Carty and Sky Sports presenter Anna Woolhouse.

The St Barnabas Hospice Wellbeing team is here to provide free support to people coping with a bereavement across Lincolnshire. To refer yourself to this service, call 0300 020 0694.

If organisations would like to speak to someone from the Wellbeing team about working in partnership, contact Laura Stones on 01522 518 246 or email laura.stones@stbarnabashospice.co.uk

Here is all of the information you need to enjoy the 17th annual Torchlight Procession.