Road trip to St Peter’s Hospice

Lollie Brewer, Helen Treleaven and Tracey Davey from our Community Services team and Amanda Addo, our Volunteer Engagement Manager have been on a road trip to Bristol and here they explain why:

After working with the UK Community Engagement Network for over 3 years now we have forged some strong links with others as passionate as ourselves.  Using MS Teams is brilliant, but sometimes you need to be in a room to fully immerse yourselves in the passion and details of what we do to really understand where our similarity and differences are and really learn from one another.

That’s why when Ethera Morgan -Social work team manager & carers lead and Caroline Mundy – Head of Clinical Engagement from St Peters Hospice invited us up to spend a day with them we jumped at the chance. Between the team they put together an interesting mix of people

Chris Benson – Director of Patient Care,  explained a bit about their IPU (Inpatient Unit) which has 15 beds, 5 of which are now nurse admission lead by their one CNS’s. Interestingly they don’t currently offer lymphoedema support.

They have a thriving ‘HUB’ which offers all kinds of day services which you can imagine was great interest to us. Abbie, their HCA who helps run it, talked us through some of their sessions on their 6-week rota including crafts, gardening, and their ‘Living Well’ workshops for those with breathlessness, fatigue and nutrition.  They have a broad tolerance to those who can use their services and may include dementia and those with enduring mental health.

Jainie Patel – Head of Patient and Family Support and head of Safeguarding, along with Ethera and talked at length about their social work team who’s focus they say is on ‘planning well to enable their clients to live well’. They have  3 social workers and 3 social work assistants. The social work assistants are trained to be able to offer training to volunteers who can assist clients with simple benefits and grants. The team can then also then focus on LPA’s, Wills, supporting dependants (Children & pets for example) carers, advocacy, and care options. From the community they have approximately 50 referrals a month which are mostly asking for financial support so having trained volunteers who can pick this up is really beneficial.

St Peters also has a full-time spiritual care lead with a number of volunteers. They offer 1-6 sessions of support for those who may need it. This is done in their Garden Room. Tom who is lead for the Psychology Therapy Team explained that they offer all kinds of spiritual and psychological support including art, drama, music, chronic pain management and counselling offering six 1:1 sessions. Their waiting list is up to 3 months as their referrals are up to 1200 per year. Tom says that 20-30% of the referrals are complex mental Health Trauma +/- homer and environmental but they are very flexible on reasons for referral. They have the view that their wording  ‘life limiting’ may be too broad perhaps!

Mark Willetts – Volunteer Services manager & Coordinator Russell Cowan were particularly interesting to us and Amanda since much of what we do and all of Amandas work is about volunteering1 in total they have about 380 volunteers for all their hospice services and 100 for retail alone. They also have 40 drivers offering hospice transport to their services using either their own cars or one of the 2 donated cars from the Masons. They have 12 roles for people to chose including within their home support visit team, therapies, and hospice ambassadors. Their hospice Neighbours scheme alone uses another 40 volunteers!

Muna Talha – Community Engagement Coordinator joined us lastly to talk about her work with less well engaged communities. Caroline was able to talk us through the differences in their sats for equality and diversity and demographics which was fascination… 36% of their last years admissions were for non-malignant clients. Fascinating to see how ethnically the counties are so different. It has given us much to think about when looking at where our own gaps in engagement might be.

Lastly, we were shown around part of the 7-acre garden where not only do they have a memory tree that stands tall in pride of place, but the gardeners are also growing their own flowers for patients’ rooms and to gain donations from buckets of cut flowers in receptions…Denis was a very proud head gardener! The CSPCN’s share the same offices with all the therapy department and the Hospice at home team which really helps with communication, particularly as all the advice line is there too. The IPU  was impressive too and very different from what we have in Cornwall , but theirs is only 4 years old! With sumptuous interiors and 2-way observation rooms for those who are restless as well as a central ‘hospitality reception’, it seemed on the surface to be an upmarket hotel rather than a hospice.

Overall, the day was a massive success. We had the opportunity to share our work with them and they learned  how we work, despite our spread demographic and limited resources. There is no doubt that we will continue to support one another with ideas and overcoming obstacles. Our next meet will be virtual via the UK Community Engagement Network where we hope to inspire others working in this field to do a bit more face to face sharing.