Prospect Hospice has been part of the Swindon community for over 40 years, caring for local people at the end of their lives. As a charity, we rely on the generous donations of the public to help us raise the vital funds we need to ensure everyone is offered our outstanding care free of charge.
Find out about the range of end-of-life care services that we offer to patients and their families. These delivered free of charge and are designed to provide compassionate, personalised support during every stage of a life-limiting illness in every kind of care setting, to anyone who needs it.
We couldn’t do what we do without considerable support from our local community. Find out all the different ways in which you can support Prospect Hospice, including fundraising, volunteering and purchasing from our shops. All contributions are greatly appreciated and enables us to deliver care that is free of charge to our patients and their families.
Whether shopping with us in person or online, or donating your pre-loved goods, we thank you for supporting us through our shops where you help to raise around £2million a year for Prospect Hospice.
We pride ourselves on being a great place to work and we're always looking for outstanding people to join our team at the hospice across all areas of the charity.
Prospect Hospice is the leading provider of education and training for end-of-life care in Swindon and north Wiltshire. Working closely with you, our colleagues within partner organisations, we want to ensure that the very best care is available to everyone facing the end of life. This is why we provide education and development opportunities, all of which aim to encourage learning and build confidence in end of life care and support.
If you’re running a hospice during a pandemic, what do you do when most of your patients, their loved ones and others in the community can’t come into your hospice building anymore? Simple, say the end-of-life care specialists at Prospect Hospice. You take the hospice out into the community instead…
Until March 2020, one of the benefits that many Prospect Hospice patients appreciated was the Day Therapy Service. Patients were offered a 16-week programme of activities twice a week at the hospice, which ranged from rehabilitation and physiotherapy to courses of how to manage symptoms such as stress, fatigue and breathlessness.
It was also, says day therapy service lead Zoe O’Reilly, a chance for patients to have some social time with people facing similar challenges to the ones they faced.
“The programmes we run are centred around the individual patient, understanding their goals and helping them achieve those,” says Zoe.
“We also ran a drop-in coffee session once a month for patients, carers and families to pop in for a chat, which was also popular.”
But when the Covid pandemic hit, the day therapy centre had to close, and staff had to work out ways of delivering the support and education that these vulnerable patients needed.
“Initially, we kept in touch with the patients who used day therapy by phone, and also via our clinical nurse specialists who see patients in their own homes,” says Zoe.
“But soon we launched a fatigue and breathlessness helpline, which took referrals from the clinical nurse specialists, and our therapy team (who already saw patients in their own homes) so we could bring the fatigue and breathless services directly to patients.”
Zoe says the sudden need to take services out of the Prospect Hospice building has helped practitioners adopt a new approach for the future.
“We’ve had a mixed response to delivering therapy virtually – some patients are all for it, while others are not comfortable – so we are now looking at how we can take more of our services out into the community, rather than focusing on holding them in our base in Wroughton.
“When we have completed the redesign of our services we hope to be able to run courses such as stress management or family therapy far closer to where people live, perhaps in local community centres, for example.”
08 January 2021
07 January 2021
05 January 2021