Hospice News

Liz, Vanessa and Sandy who are part of the End-of-Life and Hospital Palliative Care teams, and based at Forest Holme, held their first End-of-Life Care Champions Day at Poole Hospital to support colleagues across University Hospitals Dorset to enhance care provided for patients and their families at the end-of-life.

The Champions represent each ward within Poole Hospital and are all very keen to understand what matters most to the patients and their loved ones and help to assist with making this happen.

The day included an introduction to the Butterfly WINGS model of care, chaplaincy talk, syringe driver training for registered staff and scenario-based training for nonregistered staff, while Anne Currie, Chief Executive at Forest Holme Hospice Charity delivered a talk about the charity work at both Forest Holme and Macmillan Caring Locally, who are funding the new comfort packs which will be offered to patients at each hospital.

Butterfly WINGS is about promoting dignity, respect and compassion at the end-oflife. It is broken down into 5 steps with staff considering each element.

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“I've learnt the importance of end-of-life care and how to have difficult conversations.''

''The passion of the end-of-life nurses giving the talk was very inspiring.''

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Over the last few month the charity has funded weekly visits from the Taste The Bean coffee truck (above) as a morale boosting thank you to all our staff, while Rachel and Lisa from Pizza With Love (right) returned in December to freshly bake delicious woodfired pizzas for free, also as a thank you to all our staff who have worked so tirelessly through another challenging year.

We are delighted Purbeck Ice Cream has chosen to support Forest Holme for the fourth year in a row.

Each week they deliver a donation of ice cream for our patients, visitors and staff to enjoy and this year alone they have provided ice cream worth £4,500.

We also had over 80 fleeces gifted to staff at Forest Holme to thank them for their continued hard work and dedication during the pandemic. The fleeces are custom made and have been partly funded by a generous grant from J P Morgan.

We are so proud to see our counsellor Kathy Lett (right) win the Palliative Care Worker of the Year award at the Dorset Echo Bournemouth Daily Echo 'Proud To Care Awards 2021', for her outstanding work particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic.

We were also delighted that our Specialist Palliative Care Team were shortlisted for the Special Recognition Award.

The counselling team have also welcomed Emma (left), who has joined as a Volunteer Trainee Bereavement Counsellor for one day a week.

Emma is currently in her fourth year studying at Iron Mill College and needs to complete 150 hours of hands-on training in order to qualify as a counsellor.

Visitors to Forest Holme will now be greeted by two new smiling faces as Lisa (far left) and Rachel (left) have joined the team as our new receptionists.

Lisa will be covering Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesday mornings, while Rachel will take over from Wednesday afternoons until Friday each week.