We’ve been successful in our bid for a £500k grant from the Big Lottery Fund! This means we can soon start building our much anticipated new six bedroom inpatient unit.
Skanda Vale Hospice began in 1993 as a home care service. In 2003 we launched our current day care hospice. In late 2015 / early 2016 we will open our new inpatient respite unit, with the end of life service beginning approximately one year later.
We’re excited because it means people in the three counties of Carmarthenshire, Ceredigion and Pembrokeshire will have the hospice facilities and care they so badly need, at one of the most traumatic times in their life.
The new hospice will offer much more choice and equality of access to care – inpatient hospice services have (until now) been inaccessible for large parts of the regional population.
We are now in the process of working out the fine details with the architects. In the next few months we will appoint building contractors, with a view to starting construction work towards the end of the summer. We also will begin the recruitment process for a senior palliative care nurse to direct and develop the clinical part of the service.
“The new hospice unit will provide respite and end-of-life services that are not currently available in the area – many patients have to travel long distances to get the care they need.
The hospice is ideally located, near the borders of Ceredigion, Pembrokeshire and Carmarthenshire, to serve a large number of local people. Both myself and our palliative care team, look forward to collaborative working with the staff at Skanda Vale Hospice.”
Dr. Pat Purcell – palliative care consultant
New jobs for palliative care nurses
The new hospice unit will create the equivalent of five new specialist palliative nursing jobs – yet all our support workers will be continue to be fully qualified unpaid volunteers. This means that our overheads are far less than similar sized organisations. A higher proportion of donations will be invested in direct patient care.
Please get in touch if you would like to find out more about volunteering or joining the team as a nurse.