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.
Even when we may know or expect that someone is going to die, it can sometimes still be a shock when it actually happens, and our responses may come as a surprise to us. Alternatively, it may be that you have experienced a sudden and totally unexpected death as a result of an unexpected and rapidly progressing illness.
Listed below are some of the feelings and experiences often described by those we support in bereavement. These responses can feel heightened following sudden and traumatic events that leave us feeling powerless and vulnerable.
You may identify with all of them, some of them or none of them at all. It is common to experience a whole range of intense emotions that can feel as if they come and go in waves and there are no rights or wrongs in how we find ourselves grieving.
You may experience:
• Feeling frozen, or strangely calm • Crying uncontrollably or not being able to cry at all • Swinging between belief and disbelief. Turning to speak to the person who has died, hearing their voice or thinking that you have seen them • Difficulty sleeping, eating or concentrating • Feelings of restlessness, anxiety, panic or painful, anxiety-provoking flashbacks • Feeling remote from the people around you, even from close friends and family • Feeling isolated and alone • Experiencing a loss of confidence • A feeling of lethargy or the opposite, a compulsion to keep busy • Feeling that life has no purpose or meaning any more • Feelings of guilt about what you did or didn’t do • Feelings of anger directed at anyone, or everyone, perhaps including yourself or even the person who has died • You may find yourself feeling very concerned for your own health and the health of others close to you.
All these feelings, and more, are a normal and natural part of grieving and will often accompany feelings of sadness, longing and fear about the future. For some, there may be feelings of relief at knowing their loved one is no longer suffering.
Over time, these distressing feelings should lessen or feel more manageable. However, adjusting to the changes that bereavement brings can be a slow process for some people.