Until March 2020, one of the benefits that many Prospect Hospice patients appreciated was the Day Therapy Service. Patients were offered a 16-week programme of activities twice a week at the hospice, which ranged from rehabilitation and physiotherapy to courses of how to manage symptoms such as stress, fatigue and breathlessness. It was also, says day therapy service lead Zoe O’Reilly, a chance for patients to have some social time with people facing similar challenges to the ones they faced. “The programmes we run are centred around the individual patient, understanding their goals and helping them achieve those,” said Zoe.
It takes a special kind of person to be a Prospect Hospice nurse. Here Hayley Kenealy, a clinical nurse specialist with the charity, tells us what the role entails - and why she loves the job. We normally see patients who are in the last year of their lives, so our work is palliative – that is relieving pain and discomfort – rather than curative. A clinical nurse specialist, or CNS, is a specialist in end of life care, rather than a generalist, and we work out in the community rather than at Prospect Hospice’s main building in Wroughton. We take referrals from GPs, district nurses, oncologists at the hospital and even sometimes patients themselves. Because we are specialist practitioners – and also because we are an independent charity, rather than part of the NHS, we can provide a range of practical, medical and emotional support that is tailored to each individual patient and their loved ones.
If you’re running a hospice during a pandemic, what do you do when most of your patients, their loved ones and others in the community can’t come into your hospice building anymore? Simple, say the end-of-life care specialists at Prospect Hospice – you take the hospice out into the community instead.
Irene Watkins, chief executive of Prospect Hospice The Covid-19 crisis hasn’t stopped the Wroughton provider from delivering end-of-life care to patients and their families and loved ones. It’s just meant that the hospice has been taking far more of its expert services out into the community, and into people’s own homes.