Together we care and make a difference
“The word magical might be strange to understand but it was the most special time I’ve ever lived. I’ll always remember the warmth and friendship of the brilliant staff and the beauty of the place.”
Patient’s wife
Mike Palfreman Chief Executive
Goetz
Eggelhoefer Chair of Trustees
Jersey Hospice Care is an independent charity, and the Island’s only hospice.
We are here for anyone with a life-limiting condition – and those close to them – to ensure all Islanders have equal access to the best palliative care and support, when and where they need it.
All of our services are available free of charge, bringing vital comfort, warmth and security to patients and their loved ones, and helping Islanders face end of life with dignity, hope, and love.
In 2024, Hospice supported 850 Islanders, both on site in our In Patient Unit, in the community looking after patients at home or other residential settings, helping families with bereavement counselling, or through our range of other support services. We also work closely with other health care professionals providing education and training to strengthen their palliative care knowledge and skills.
We are extremely proud of all that we achieved during 2024, underpinning the 2024 –2026 strategy, with a clear and exciting direction for your Hospice. We introduced efficiencies and improved our patient experience with the installation of a state-of-the-art call bell system on the In Patient Unit and a Hospice wide phone system, and we extended our reach
across the community with our Compassionate Neighbours scheme.
Hospice continued to be a very special place for our patients and their families, and we were privileged to host a beautiful wedding in our gardens, a birthday party in our Sanctuary and helped a patient watch his son cross the finish line at the Hospice 2 Hospice Half Marathon.
At the end of the year, we announced that Mike Palfreman will retire as Chief Executive in summer 2025. During his four years at Hospice, he led the team through the aftermath of the Covid pandemic and the subsequent recovery and growth of the charity to more solid financial stability.
We remain extremely proud to be part of an amazing organisation with amazing people – be that colleagues, volunteers, or partners – all of whom are committed to providing this vital care and support to our community.
Thank you
Islanders received care throughout 2024
Our Vision and Mission provide the foundation of our strategy; and our values are at the heart of everything our colleagues and volunteers do - they underpin what we do, and how we do it.
My mum was first diagnosed [with cancer] in 2018. She was sent to England for treatment for a month, and eventually the cancer went away. But four years later, it came back even stronger. Then she got referred to this lovely place – the Hospice.
A little background on my mum – she suffered from anxiety and depression all her life. It’s tough seeing your mum every single day in tears. Coming here, I saw a different side to her. She was happier, she felt like she got control of her whole life again. To see her smile and talk to the nurses – even make jokes – I hadn’t seen her that happy in a very long time. If the staff were to walk past me right now, I’d treat them as family because they’re the reason why my mum was in the best way she could have been.
Hospice isn’t a place where people go to die… I think it’s where individuals find peace – like myself, like my mother, my family… knowing that she’s in safe hands. Until you step through the doors, and how people welcome you, how bright it is – and just how supportive people are… I think that changes the whole idea of what you think Hospice is like. The moment I stepped in there I thought, “wow”. I called this place home for a whole week.
There was no better place she could have gone to.
“Hospice isn’t a place where people go to die I think it’s where individuals find peace.”
During 2024, we worked on the five priorities set out in our three year strategy (2024 – 2026) – extending our reach across our community, creating a specialist centre for best practice and learning, enhancing Islanders’ awareness and understanding of the work of their Hospice, growing and developing our people to be the best they can be, and achieving financial sustainability to enable us to develop services and provide for the needs of Islanders in the future.
Extending our reach
• Grow our existing adult clinical services.
• Develop new adult clinical services.
• Further develop relationships with other providers including Government.
• Further extend our reach in the delivery of palliative and end of life care education across the community.
1,915 sessions provided by our Bereavement and Emotional Support Team
We cared for more Islanders in 2024.
We continued to take a lead role in the End of Life Partnership Group, gaining a greater understanding of the existing unmet needs of patients, families, and carers in Jersey.
We entered into a new agreement with the Government of Jersey to support expansion of our existing specialist community support and education services. We also developed plans for a Living Well Team that will reach out to Islanders much earlier in their diagnosis.
We demonstrated increased use of advance care planning across all our teams, supporting patients with their plans and wishes.
Creating a specialist
• Continue to drive a culture of continuous learning and improvement in the clinical setting.
• Continue to develop a competency and career framework to support with colleague development, recruitment, retention, and quality of care.
• Develop a more outward facing education and research unit.
We continued to achieve positive Jersey Care Commission inspections and regularly achieved key performance indicator targets. We implemented a structured improvement mechanism – learning from patient, family, and carer feedback.
We supported colleagues to present their work at the Hospice UK National Conference.
We developed a schedule of clinical audit, that will enable the regular review of practice and learning.
• Establish Hospice as Jersey’s charity of choice for supporters.
• Grow and evolve support through outstanding twoway engagement and gold standard stewardship of new and existing supporters.
• Enhance Islanders’ understanding of death, dying, and bereavement, and normalise these conversations.
We launched a ‘Did you know?’ campaign to raise awareness amongst our Island community about the breadth of our services and dispel misconceptions that exist about hospice care. We evolved our communications to demonstrate the need and positive impact of supporting Hospice – including a greater use of family feedback and videos.
We continued to provide superb stewardship to all supporters; hosting a thank you event at Hospice and our second annual thank-a-thon.
• Ensure we have an engaged, skilled, motivated, and resilient team of people.
• Become the “Charity of Choice” for all.
• Build a people infrastructure that meets the current and future needs of Hospice and our people.
New internal Education Strategy designed to meet the needs of all our people, resulted in more than 80 training sessions facilitated to more than 450 attendees.
We worked to extend our education reach to care homes, home care providers, family carers, and other allied health professionals.
We launched Hospice’s Compassionate Neighbours Scheme, to help reduce loneliness and isolation for those with life-limiting conditions.
We rolled out our second employee survey which achieved an engagement score of 91%.
20 volunteers matched as Compassionate Neighbours
• Grow existing income generation activities and invest in innovative, diversified, and sustainable sources of income.
• Continue to drive cost efficiency and ensure the best use of our resources, delivering value for money to the Charity’s supporters and partner organisations.
• Develop and implement a robust financial plan to eradicate the structural deficit and enable Hospice to develop and increase the capacity of our services to meet the needs of the Island in the future.
• Meaningfully reduce the negative impact Hospice has on the environment.
We continued to evolve and develop our events and wider fundraising income streams. A new Head of Retail, focused on refining processes within the shops, colleague development, talent attraction, the delivery of low, or no-cost shop improvement initiatives, and bringing plans for a third retail outlet at Holme Grown to fruition.
We re-introduced the hiring of our meeting rooms to generate income.
We worked closely with Health & Care Jersey and successfully concluded a new contract to provide a solid foundation and contribution towards the overall costs of all our services.
196 patients admitted to the In Patient Unit, a 17% increase from 2023
“The kindness, patience, and love shown by you all meant the Derek’s last days were dignified, respected, and pain managed, so that we could spend quality time together as husband and wife.”
Debbie, patient’s wife
Without the generosity and support of our community, we simply could not do what we do. To all those who took part in our events, bought a lottery ticket, shopped in our shops, or put a coin in a collection tin – thank you – you are the reason we can care.
3,830 436 £1.1m
5000 Club tickets sold
Santa Dashers
Income generated from shop sales
47
Dragon Boat teams
402
Attended Candles on the Beach
Sales from our two shops in St Ouen and St Helier generated 13% of our income. Our shops continued to perform strongly throughout 2024 thanks not only to those that shop, but the quality of items donated by our community.
Volunteers across all areas of Hospice keep our services running.
330 volunteers
26,337 volunteer hours
This equates to 13 full time colleagues
“I’ve made some lovely new friends by volunteering. It makes me very happy and I’m proud to support Hospice.”
Anne, Volunteer
Our specialist Education Team are leaders in palliative and end of life care education, providing training to Hospice colleagues and across the Island to care homes, home care providers, family carers, and other allied health professionals.
More than 700people received training 80 external education sessions delivered
We are immensely proud of everything we achieved during 2024; however, we also encountered several challenges that we worked on collaboratively to, where possible, minimise their impact on our services and income. These included;
Continued delays to the granting of planning permission for our occupation of part of the Holme Grown store, which delayed the opening of our new third shop from October 2024 to April 2025.
The need to use a locum doctor, agency nurses, and health care assistants to temporarily fill vacant posts to enable us to continue to deliver our services.
Difficulty accessing accommodation for colleagues relocating to the Island, which made recruitment even more challenging.
A changing fundraising landscape because of the cost-of-living crisis.
70 Islanders are cared for each month by our Specialist Palliative Care Team On average
All our services are available free of charge to patients and their loved ones. Alongside the funding we receive from the Government of Jersey, we rely mainly on fundraising by the community, local businesses, trusts, gifts in wills, and income from our shops to enable the running of all our services. These included;
And more than £6.5 million per year to deliver our services
Our colleagues are committed to providing the high quality of care that we are known and loved for.
88% of colleagues took part in our second employee survey
We had an engagement rate of 91%
100% of colleagues who took part said they are proud to work for Hospice
2 colleagues presented at the Hospice UK National Conference
“Jersey Hospice Care is a very purposeful place to be. The best thing about working for Hospice is the ability to do the job that I love in such a compassionate environment with a team that share the same values.”
Hospice colleague
“David was given the most tender loving care and was kept comfortable and pain free, which is all he ever wanted.”
Carole, patient’s wife