Welcome / Contents

Welcome to the Summer edition of our newsletter. I’d like to take this opportunity to welcome Angie Smith to her new role as Chair of Trustees for the Charity and wish her every success. Angie brings a wealth of knowledge and experience of the health and social care sectors to the role. She is very keen to ensure that as we begin to emerge from the pandemic that the opportunities and lessons learnt from the last two years help to shape our organisation for the future to help meet the growing demands on Forest Holme’s services.

It is really heartening to see so many events and fundraising activities return to the calendar. We really have missed them. One of the most important days of the year for us is our Tie a Yellow Ribbon event at the Hospice on June 16. We would like to invite you join us this year for a moment of quiet reflection whilst catching up with the rest of the Forest Holme family. Who knows we might even get some sunshine this year! As you will read in the newsletter, we continue to be blown away by all the fundraising activities and donations undertaken for the hospice during a challenging time for many. All these achievements help to provide the best care possible by the hospice teams for patients and their families within our community. Your kindness helps to make that difference. Thank you.

We are very pleased to be planning a refurbishment of Forest Holme. The hospice itself has not been decorated since 2013 with some of the rooms being untouched since the hospice was originally built in 1993. There is not only an obvious visible need for refurbishment due to significant wear and tear, but a practical need for more patient friendly facilities, functionality and overall space for the growing palliative and end-of-life care service. Our Board of Trustees have therefore allocated £400,000 towards the cost of the refurbishment with the hope that we can raise a similar about on top of that for the changes to be made. Watch this space… As well as the refurbishment, the Charity is very proud to commit to funding 16 different members of staff within the inpatient ward, community, hospital, admin, education, therapy and counselling teams within the hospice.

The number of roles has grown significantly over the last few years and your support of Forest Holme has enabled the Charity to fund these additional staff posts. We will be featuring some of these new roles in future newsletters.

For the first time ever, our annual expenditure will be over £1 million pounds. At the start of a new financial year, there is always some trepidation as to where all of this money might possibly come from. How do we plan for it? How do we make the best use of our resources? Where do we spend your money to make the greatest impact for patients and their families? How do we know we are meeting a need? What things are we not doing that we should be doing? All these questions have to be considered and we really value your input with this. By sharing your story on Care Opinion, taking time to give us feedback and or being a critical friend, it can really help us to deliver what really matters to people at the end-of-life. Our Board of Trustees and Charity team are very committed to getting this right working alongside our colleagues in the NHS, so please don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any thoughts on improvements that could be made. We look forward to hearing from you. Thank you again for your unwavering support. With best wishes, Anne

2. Welcome / Contents 4. In Memory 6. Charity Update 8. Pop-In Group 9. Challenge Yourself 10. Hospice News 12. Fundraising For Forest Holme

15. Tie A Yellow Ribbon

18. A message from the new Chair

20. Meet The Mindfulness Coach

23. Care Opinion

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