We wish you a merry Christmas

It has been a fantastic year for St. Joseph’s Hospice as we celebrated confirmation from the Care Quality Commission (CQC) that we are a ‘Good’ hospice.

Not only that, but we made lots of new appointments to strengthen our nursing team in 2018 and we are really excited about the team we have built. We also received a £10,000 grant from the Big Lottery Fund to enable us to explore developing new services and improving facilities for patients and their families. We hope to bring you lots more exciting news about this in 2019.

We welcomed 50,000 resident honeybees to the hospice after local beekeeper, John Ryan, approached us about locating a bee hive in the 12 acres of woodland surrounding the hospice.

We launched Celebration of Life, where recently bereaved families are invited back to the hospice to remember and celebrate the life of their loved one. These quarterly events have been really well received and we will certainly be continuing them and building on them in 2019.

We also launched a brand new health and wellbeing project with Liverpool-based charity, The Reader. The weekly shared reading sessions for staff, volunteers, families and patients have been proven to improve mental health and wellbeing.

We also faced some changes due to GDPR legislation which came in to effect back in May. We renewed our Data Protection and Privacy Policy but we need to keep in touch with our supporters more than ever. We have asked those who would like to continue hearing from the hospice to set their communication preferences via our website www.jospice.org.uk or by contacting our fundraising team on 0151 932 6044. Otherwise, sadly, we won’t be able to keep our supporters updated on hospice news and events. It’s not too late. Please let us know as soon as possible if and how you would like to be contacted and we will keep you fully informed.

Finally, we took the opportunity in 2018 to have a major clear out at the hospice, as well as update and redecorate some of our patient areas. We are delighted that in January the hospice will reopen all patient areas and will be operating at full capacity once again.

As the year draws to a close, we’d like to take this opportunity to say a great big THANK YOU to everyone who has supported us in 2018. Our incredible team of volunteers, our local community in Thornton and Crosby, the many businesses who have sponsored us or donated goods or prizes, and everyone who has played our lottery or come along to enjoy one of our events. Please continue to support us in 2019.