Welcome / Contents

Welcome to our Autumn newsletter.

The beautiful leaves are starting to turn, the mornings are a little crisper and the change of the seasons is in the air once again. There will be lots of people sad to see the end of summer days and lighter nights, but there will also be many who love the darker, cosier evenings and the run up to the Festive Season (Hello, Strictly…).

I was trying to reflect on, and summarise, the last few months and the one word which keeps popping up is ‘change’. For a lot of us, the way we go about our daily lives has changed. In the last week, I’ve had face to face meetings with our Board of Trustees, our Patron and the full Charity team for the first time in eighteen months. It felt good to have some familiarity back after living life in the virtual world.

During this time, we have been working closely with our friends at another local charity, Macmillan Caring Locally, to see how we can best support University Hospitals Dorset NHS Foundation’s Trust now merged Palliative and End-of-Life Care service, based across two sites, at both Forest Holme and the Macmillan Unit in Christchurch.

This change gives us a wonderful opportunity to look at how we can further support our clinical and nursing colleagues to meet the ever-growing demand on our services across East Dorset. We need to ensure equity of access to services, maintaining the excellent levels of patient/family care, and with your continued support, can help develop these services both now and in the future.

Your very kind donations, wonderful fundraising efforts and thoughtful gifts in Wills, given during this time, have meant that we were able to fund two new Nurse Development roles to work within the Community and End-of-Life Care teams, a part-time complementary therapist and a third full-time counsellor. Thank you for helping to make a difference to others within your community.

With the change in restrictions during the summer, we were able to hold a scaled down ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon’ event on a very wet and windy August day in the hospice’s car park. It was lovely to meet so many new people whose loved ones had been cared for by the wonderful teams at Forest Holme during lockdown