Hospice joins national call for fair funding

Kate Heslegrave, Co-Chief Executive, and Kirsty Smith, Hospice Matron, visited Parliament on 15th April as part of a Day of Action organised by national body Hospice UK. Representatives from the hospice community delivered a letter to the Prime Minister, while Ms Heslegrave and Ms Smith joined hospice leaders and frontline nursing colleagues from hospices that have already been forced to make significant service cuts, to highlight to MPs the reality of the national funding crisis.

It costs St Helena Hospice £8.1 million per year to run just its clinical services, and while half of these costs are covered by its NHS grant, it needs to generate an additional £20 million in income each year to fund the shortfall; therefore the NHS grant only contributes 20% of the total income needed to generate funds for its clinical services.  

Despite ongoing media attention asking for fair funding for hospices, St Helena’s NHS grant will only see a 2.03% uplift in this financial year, in effect another real time funding cut; this is a situation hospices nationwide are also facing.

Before catching a train to London, Ms Heslegrave spoke to Sonia Watson on BBC Essex reiterating how St Helena Hospice had to make £1.6 million of cuts to clinical services last summer and, sadly, make some redundancies. She explained that the hospice now has only eight of its 18 inpatient unit beds open and is facing waiting lists for beds and care that some people will not live long enough to reach the top of. 

However, she reassured the north east Essex community that, following the devastating service cuts in the summer, the hospice is now financially sustainable, and expects to be for at least the next three years. The focus is now on sustainable regrowth of services in line with affordability. 

In the campaign for fair funding for hospices, St Helena Hospice stands by its colleagues in other local hospices who are now having to make cuts of their own.

The Day of Action also saw BBC Look East visit Colchester to interview Dr Karen Chumbley, Co-Chief Executive, along with a family currently supported by St Helena Hospice, reporting on the local funding picture.