Hospiscare and Budleigh Salterton & District Hospiscare have merged. Read the full story here.

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Care when it is needed

Care when it is needed

By making a donation today, you will ensure Hospiscare can continue to deliver specialist end-of-life care to those who need it most.

This Spring, we need YOUR help to continue delivering specialist care for around 2,000 patients and their families every year across the heart of Devon.

Recently we have asked for your kind support to help us bridge the gap while we entered discussions with the Devon Integrated Care Board (ICB) regarding the low level of funding we receive from them compared to other hospices.

In response to those discussions, additional funds have been pledged to Hospiscare by the ICB for the financial year of 2024/25. While the additional payment is welcome, it still only brings our statutory funding to a 24% contribution – far short of the national average of 37% that other hospices receive.

When combined with soaring costs during the recent cost-of-living crisis, this has sadly resulted in Hospiscare facing an income shortfall of £2.5 million and has led to a cutting of some of our services.

Donate today

With more and more patients experiencing complex symptoms or having more than one terminal illness, your support is vital in ensuring Hospiscare can continue to care. 

By making a donation today, you’ll be supporting local people like Gerald (Ges), who Patch, Hospiscare’s Specialist Palliative Care Paramedic, shares their story below

Read Ges’ story

A donation of...

  • £143.29

    could cover the mileage costs of our community nursing teams for a day.

  • £106.81

    could deliver an hour of specialist nursing care to a patient in their own home.

  • £42.12

    could enable us to offer telephone bereavement support to the loved ones of a patient who is no longer with us.

How your donation makes a difference

Patch is Hospiscare’s Specialist Palliative Care Paramedic. After joining Hospiscare on a secondment two and a half years ago, Patch was given the opportunity to stay and develop the role alongside Hospiscare’s Clinical teams, adding real value to the specialist care we offer.

Patch gets called to urgent cases at any time. Gerald (Ges) is just one patient Patch has supported during his time at Hospiscare.

He explains: “Ges had been known to the community team for a number of months as we had also cared for his wife who had recently died. He himself had cancer, so was under the care of a Clinical Nurse Specialist (CNS) based at King’s House.

During one of her planned telephone reviews she was very concerned about Ges’s physical condition as he was very muddled on the telephone. She decided to go and do a home visit at once so that she could assess how he was and asked me to go with her. Ges was very unwell and was bed-bound, and it was obvious that he hadn’t been able to take proper care of himself or his dogs for some days.”

“If you can afford to make a donation, no matter how much, it is always appreciated. It is such a privilege to be able to help patients, but we simply couldn’t do so without you.”

Patch continues: “We liaised with his GP and recommended that he was urgently admitted to hospital. Ges was admitted straight away and received the appropriate treatment for sepsis, a life-threatening infection – but without this, his outcome would have been very different. When he was well enough, Ges returned home where we continued to monitor him regularly to ensure he was managing his symptoms and to support him with his grief, which was the fundamental cause of him becoming so depressed and unwell at that time.

It’s taken some time, but Ges’s health has now settled, his cancer is currently under control and so he is well enough to be discharged from our care for the time being.”

We are only able to help people like Ges because of the generosity of people like you. Thank you.

Donate today