A few words from our Chair, Morgan Jones
Welcome to St Christopher’s annual report and accounts 2019-20. Looking back over the last year, I am immensely proud of everything that the team has achieved.
Over the last year we supported 7,592 people and those close to them as they approached the end of life. St Christopher’s Hospice has been committed to caring for and supporting dying people since its foundation by Dame Cicely Saunders in 1967.
We continued construction on our new Centre for Awareness and Response into End of Life (CARE) and the high quality of our care was recognised by our latest CQC inspection finding us to be ‘Outstanding’.
We’ve also invested much time and energy into the development of our Ambitions which will guide our work for the next three years. We hope you’ll give us your support in making these a reality. Together, we can make sure that everyone has access to the care and support they need at the end of life, wherever they may be.
Despite the challenges of COVID-19 the team has adapted to deliver services in new ways and our supporters have been incredibly generous at this difficult time.
I have been incredibly proud to be the Chair of St Christopher’s over the last seven years, but never more so than in the last few months.
Thank you, as ever, to staff, volunteers and supporters for your ongoing commitment to St Christopher’s.
Our year in numbers 2019/20
7,500+
Number of people we provided care and support for across our five London boroughs
14,237
Number of home visits
2,054
Number of people who attended one of our education events
3,061
Number of physical rehabilitation sessions delivered
What we do with your money
Where our money comes from
Where our money goes
Our vision
“A world in which all dying people, and those close to them, have access to the care and support they need, when and wherever they need it.”
Our values
- Pioneering and bold
- Of and for the community
- Empowering and compassionate
- One team working together
- Expert
- Stronger through partnerships.
Our strategic priorities
- Extending our reach
- Ensuring our long-term sustainability
- Maintaining and improving the quality of care provided by us and others
- Driving innovation and new models of care
- Empowering the public around death, dying and loss
“Staff from the hospice have helped us cut through a lot of the red tape and access support for our customers who are at the end of life”
Kate and Liam work at a homeless hostel we support in Croydon
Extending our reach
We aim to support as many people as possible and tailor our care to meet people’s individual needs. Whatever support might be needed, we’re there to help.
Supporting people through bereavement
We provide bereavement support to adults and children across south London. Our Bereavement Help Points support people by signposting bereavement services in their local area.
Our Bereavement Help Points launched in 2018 and have been expanding ever since. We now have three in Bromley, two in Lambeth and one each in Lewisham and Croydon. The Bereavement Help Points provide places in the community where people can come to find out more about bereavement services in their area and meet with other people who may be experiencing something similar. Since 2018 the Bereavement Help Points have provided support and guidance for 846 people.
St Christopher’s has been providing bereavement counselling to patients’ families for over 45 years. Our Candle Child Bereavement Service extends this support to all children, young people and their families in the five boroughs we serve. In the last financial year Candle received referrals for 257 families and 442 children. Additionally, the service handled 334 calls from people seeking advice around childhood bereavement counselling. Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, the Candle service has continued to operate by providing telephone support
Working with carers
We are giving more support to carers of people with a terminal illness. We’ve created a toolkit to help carers reflect on their needs and allow us and others to respond.
One of the most pioneering aspects of this work was the development of a toolkit to provide improved support for carers of dying people, who have no recourse to public funds. Working with our Welfare and Social Work Teams, as well as carers in this situation, we identified the significant challenges and dilemmas these carers face and identified new ways for hospice staff and others to support them. These findings are being developed into a toolkit which will also enable others to identify such carers and respond to their needs. We are very grateful to St. James’s Place Charitable Foundation,with the help of Hospice UK, for generously funding this work.
In the course of the year, we responded to a request from NHS commissioners in Lewisham to establish a telephone advice service for carers of people who are dying within the borough. Since the service was established in 2019 we have supported 187 people and are delighted that the NHS has invited us to continue providing this service in the future.
Making end of life care a priority
We’re exploring how we can make end of life care available to some of the most vulnerable people. This includes work with homeless people and those in social housing.
The ‘Better lives, better endings’ project, funded by Women in Fellowship and Octavia Housing, offers us a new opportunity to extend end of life care skills into social housing for vulnerable people. We have worked with residents, their families and staff within Octavia to understand their aspirations around end of life and how these can be best achieved. Drawing on these insights, we are creating training materials and other resources that can be used by Octavia and other organisations to help their residents prepare for end of life and enable their staff to support them accordingly. This learning will be disseminated via a conference at the end of the project and be readily available through online resources.
In partnership with University College London, St Christopher’s has been working to extend and improve end of life care for homeless people. The pilot project, which involves community nurses and social workers, is being trialled at two hostels in Croydon. Hospice nurses and social workers are teaching hostel staff how to identify and support people coming to the end of their lives. The intention is to use this project as a framework to support end of life care in other hostels for homeless people across the country.
Increased access to our expertise
More people need our help than ever before, so we’re creating better ways to meet that need. We’ve partnered with Marie Curie to improve out-of-hours care and reduce A&E admissions.
Over the last year we have supported 862 people on our wards, made over 14,000 visits to people in the community and welcomed people to over 9,000 outpatient sessions at our sites; covering everything from symptom management and gym sessions, to cognitive behavioural therapy and art therapy
Since 2017 we have experienced a 49% increase in out-of-hours calls. In March 2020, we joined forces with Marie Curie to improve out-of-hours care for people dying in Lewisham and respond to that growing need. The Rapid Response service is available overnight, seven days a week, 365 days a year. With 82% of people saying they would choose to die in the comfort of their own home (The National Survey of Bereaved People (VOICES) 2014), services like this one are vital, especially as hospital deaths in Lewisham are higher than the national average at 52.7%. Through the partnership, St Christopher’s and Marie Curie aim to reduce A&E admissions and help people to stay at home, where the majority of people want to be.
Increasing awareness of the hospice
We want everyone who needs us to know who we are and how to access our services and expertise. To help us stand out, we’ve refreshed our brand and the language we use.
We began talking to local people, through a series of high street surveys, about their knowledge of the hospice and how we could improve awareness of our services in their communities.
Based on those findings, and feedback from the patients and families we support, the hospice brand was refreshed in the summer of 2019. Our new approach places emphasis on communicating clearly and avoiding jargon, using photographs of real people to give the public an honest and authentic view of our work and ensuring our brand is used consistently, so posters and leaflets are instantly recognisable as coming from St Christopher’s.
We hope these measures will help us to better connect with people who need our help and those that can support us in our work.
“Maintaining your independence is important, because when you’re struggling with all kinds of limitations it can help bring a sense of meaning and purpose to life”
Wendy is one of our occupational therapists who supports people to improve their wellbeing through physical rehabilitation
Driving innovation and
new models of care
With people living longer and developing more complex needs, it’s crucial that we constantly find new ways to care for and support the people that need us.
Supporting people with frailty
Our frailty service is reaching more people than before and we’ve created a new training project to share our knowledge with others.
Our frailty service, known as Bromley Care Coordination (BCC), continues to develop a new palliative approach to supporting people with frailty. The service enables patients with an advanced illness to receive timely and coordinated care in the community and continues to grow, this year exceeding its target number of referrals (600) by 6%.
We want to share our knowledge and enable others to provide good end of life care for people who live into late old age. For that reason we have developed Cascade – a two-year project which aims to increase the quality of end of life care for older people with severe frailty; generously funded by the Burdett Trust for Nursing. Through collaborative working between community nursing and hospice teams, Cascade has identified key skills for nurses in a variety of settings and, in the next stage of the project, will identify key training resources to support the development and growth of these essential skills and better improve care.
Developing palliative care for people with heart failure
We’re partnering with hospitals to help manage heart failure at the end of life.
Supporting people with advancing heart failure to live and die well is a key area of focus for us. We are fortunate to have doctors and nurses within our team who have dual expertise in heart failure and palliative care, as well as a nurse practitioner who is dedicated to the support of heart failure patients and the development of related skills in the rest of the hospice workforce. They have been working with colleagues in the local hospital and beyond, to shape and deliver services that address the symptoms of heart failure, as well as end of life care needs. At the heart of this work are monthly multi-disciplinary meetings in which hospice, hospital and community-based colleagues discuss individual patients and how best to support them.
In July last year, in partnership with our hospital colleagues, we ran a national conference on heart failure and end of life to share our learning from this work. The conference was attended by 110 people and received great feedback. In response to the feedback received, and in partnership with the British Society of Heart Failure and King’s College Hospital, we have organised a survey of practitioners across the UK on key aspects of heart failure management and have developed a virtual national community of practice. This draws in hospitals, hospices and community nurses who learn together about this complex area of care.
Dementia services
Dementia is now a leading cause of death in the UK. In response, we have developed programmes of support for carers, professionals and the public; while also leading a professional community in south east England to share good practice.
Dementia is now a leading cause of death in the UK demanding that organisations, such as St Christopher’s, respond proactively and comprehensively to support people with advanced dementia and their carers. We continue to work with Memory Bridge, an American organisation led by Michael Verde, focused on addressing the social isolation that can arise from the disease. Michael’s visit in the autumn drew a variety of audiences ranging from the public to professionals in hospices and care homes to learn more about this often-ignored aspect of the condition.
In addition, the hospice runs a virtual community of practice for practitioners in the south east of England around dementia, as part of a national initiative led by Hospice UK. This community meets monthly and comprises other hospices, GPs, a local dementia hub and a research centre. Within the hospice we have developed a network of nurses working as Dementia Champions across our services to develop resources and skills to better support patients, family members and visitors with dementia.
This year we also launched a programme of support for carers of people with dementia at home known as Care with Compassion, which draws on trained volunteers who deliver a programme of comfort and support called Namaste. This is funded by a charity, Hope for Home, which is committed to enabling people with dementia to remain at home. The programme trained 97 people in total across eight events in the last year, 53 of those were from St Christopher’s and 44 were external delegates.
Encouraging people to manage their own care
We were involved in an NHS England study to make care more people centred and we’re delighted to announce that it was a huge success!
At St Christopher’s, we have been involved in the 2019-20 Commissioning for Quality and Innovation (CQUIN) study from NHS England, which is looking for ways to give people more control over their care – a key focus for the NHS in their long-term planning.
The study at the hospice involved 50 people, who set themselves goals related to regaining or improving their activity, or alleviating symptoms such as pain and breathlessness. For the first time in a palliative care setting, we used a newly developed system to measure people’s success in achieving these goals.
The new system was a success and, going forward, it will help us support and train clinicians to know when to use it as an aid to enabling people to play a more active role in their care.
Independence through the wellbeing programme
St Christopher’s has always been about more than just great medical care, we’re about helping people live well and keep doing the things they enjoy.
Our wellbeing programme remains very popular with the people we support. The Living Well at Home Team, who provide support to help people manage daily activities at home, made 245 visits last year. Meanwhile, in our gyms at Orpington and Sydenham, we delivered over 3,000 physical rehabilitation sessions.
Art sessions at the hospice are now open to everyone, with 322 sessions delivered last year. Patients, family, friends and members of the public come together to enjoy the creative process and share their experiences through the mediums of paint, clay, collage and much more. The hospice continues to offer group and one-toone art therapy sessions.
Working alongside the charity Hospice Biographers, the hospice now has a number of volunteers who have been trained to record the stories of patients. Stories are recorded at broadcast quality and offer patients the chance to record their experiences for those close to them and for the therapeutic benefit of telling their story.
The Bereavement Support Team celebrated the one year anniversary of the Healthy Walks programme in October. Every Thursday afternoon a group of staff, volunteers and members of the community set off from the hospice for a lunchtime walk around Crystal Palace Park. Supported by Walking For Health, this initiative aims to improve people’s lives and their health by encouraging simple daily exercise and socialising with others.
“[St Christopher’s] always [communicate] with patients about their care and treatment in a way they could understand”
The inspectors praising staff during our recent CQC visit
Maintaining and improving
the quality of care
Maintaining and improving the quality of care provided by us and others. We believe that everyone, regardless of their circumstances or where they live, has a right to high quality end of life care. That’s why it is essential we continue to develop our services and offer education and support to other organisations.
Review by our regulators
We were delighted to receive an ‘Outstanding’ rating from the CQC in early March, a fair and accurate reflection of the work that our staff and volunteers do to ensure that people’s lives matter until their last moment.
The unannounced inspection took place on 11 and 12 December 2019. Inspectors spoke with a variety of patients and staff from all areas of the hospice; from healthcare assistants and orderlies, to welfare and bereavement support workers. The report recognised that we are outstanding overall, having been rated as good in the categories of safe and caring, and outstanding in the remaining categories of effective, responsive and well led.
The inspectors highlighted the high quality of care that we provide; the compassion we have for patients; the kindness of our staff and the clear and regular communication we have with patients to ensure they are involved in decision making about their care.
Identifying areas for improvement
We always want to do better for you. To achieve this we’ve created a new Model of Quality that will help us to make improvements across the hospice, not just in our care services, but in all areas.
Under the guidance of our Director of Quality and the Quality Governance Team, we have been working hard to strengthen our quality governance processes. In April 2019 we launched our new Model of Quality within the hospice, which has relevance for the whole organisation and not just the care services.
Improving the care of service users has been a key driver in the introduction of the Learning Panels. These groups of multi-disciplinary professionals are used to learn from a complaint or an incident. As a result of Learning Panels, we improved the care of more complex patients in care homes by ensuring their care is regularly reviewed by a consultant; and changed our process for receiving new patients by including all key teams in their initial review.
Quality improvement extends beyond St Christopher’s. We have been working alongside our care home partners to pilot a scheme that provides greater clinical support by placing dedicated clinical staff in our Single Point of Contact team. This work is linked with a new initiative in Croydon which offers telephone support to all care homes, so that their staff get immediate access to expert advice as necessary. Bromley CCG have since introduced the technology to 10 of their care homes.
Encouraging feedback
Your feedback is essential, so we’re finding more ways to collect it sooner. Our response to feedback has seen improvements made to our signage, decoration and facilities.
Improvements in care have always been supported by the collection of patient feedback in our annual VOICES survey, but this year we trained several volunteers to collect real-time feedback from patients on our wards. This feedback, collected within the first four days of a patient’s time with us, has made it easier to address concerns and problems at the outset, rather than finding out about these weeks or months later following the patient survey. One action resulting from feedback was the allocation of single rooms, when capacity allowed, to patients who requested greater privacy.
To identify other areas for improvement, we asked patients to provide feedback on our care environment at both sites last year. This involved a number of patients and carers completing a questionnaire focusing on the impression given when arriving in our buildings and the cleanliness, tidiness, decoration and condition of all areas including receptions, Anniversary Centre, Caritas Centre, outpatient clinics, toilets and external areas. In response, we are looking to make improvements to our signage, decoration, artwork, toilet facilities and heating of the reception area.
Measuring our effectiveness
We’ve been working with Hull York Medical School to measure the impact of our care and support. This way we can be sure that we are being effective.
In the last year we have strengthened efforts around measuring and ensuring effectiveness – which we define as an improvement in the health of someone, regardless of their deteriorating condition. Such improvements could include reduced symptoms, less anxiety or depression. We have been working with Hull York Medical School to collect and analyse data regarding individual patients in our care. This data allows us to measure aspects of their health and identify whether we make a positive difference to them over time. The good news is that for many of our patients we do. The study showed improvements in pain, breathlessness, anxiety and depression, which is a great achievement given how sick many of our patients are.
Staff engagement and happiness
Our survey in 2019 showed an improvement in comparison to the 2018 survey. We are pleased that staff enjoy working at St Christopher’s and we’ve identified some areas for improvement.
Our staff survey in 2019 was facilitated externally and benchmarked against 46 hospices across the UK. Although our participation rate fell slightly, we felt that the responses remained very representative of the broader workforce views. Importantly, scores were an improvement on the 2018 survey.
Particular areas of note relate to the levels of confidence our staff have in both our Executive Team and our Trustee Board. There were a few areas we will continue to improve in the coming year which include:
• staff health and wellbeing (with attention to work pressures/workload and increasing support available)
• performance management, namely consistency in performance management, supervision and feedback
• reducing impact on the environment, demanding more effort to use energy efficiently and to reduce, reuse and recycle waste
• greater use of technology to improve internal processes/systems
• improving communications across teams/ departments.
A series of projects and initiatives are taking place to address these issues, which are actively monitored through our Wider Leadership Group.
During the Covid-19 pandemic we have worked hard to maintain staff engagement and happiness. We provided staff and volunteers with 35 wellbeing sessions produced in the first few weeks of lockdown and made sure staff were kept up to date with organisational developments through a regular briefing.
Developing our skills and expertise
We provide development programmes for staff and have introduced a new programme specifically to train outstanding senior leaders.
During 2019 we held a number of organisation-wide training workshops for managers and other key staff, designed to support continuous improvement initiatives across the organisation. We completed a full evaluation of the nine-month programme shortly after the programme came to an end. All 24 attendees confirmed they had found the development programme very beneficial in improving their skills and/or their confidence as managers and leaders, and several talked about their desire to take on different or new organisational responsibilities or duties following completion of the programme.
We have also developed and introduced a new Associate Director Development Programme which was designed to support the development of three Heads of Department. The programme is designed to enable these staff to take on more senior roles as and when they become available within the organisation. The two-year programme has been specifically tailored and personalised to meet the needs of those selected. With access to a personal development budget, some protected time and access to a mentor and/or coach, the participants are each undertaking a dedicated piece of work aligned with organisational objectives.
Recruiting and training a skilled paid and volunteer workforce
Maintaining and improving the quality of our care relies on recruiting, training and supporting our workforce so that we can deliver essential services and support now and in the future.
At the end of November 2019, the HR/People Team successfully launched its new Reach Applicant Tracking System (ATS) to help speed up, streamline and improve the efficiency of all of our recruitment and onboarding processes. The new system has enabled our recruiting managers to have greater responsibility for monitoring and managing their vacancies, and the separation of personal information from the application forms has helped to reduce any unconscious bias that may exist. Feedback from recruiting managers has been very positive.
During 2019, we introduced new Volunteer Taster days.
Both days proved to be very popular, particularly across
our local communities. The 70 people who came along
were able to learn about how we and our volunteers
actively support our patients and their families within
the hospice and within the local community. The
feedback was positive; a comment that particularly
stood out was: “A really super inspirational day; thank
you so much to the organisation and the excellent
speakers, you made it professional and very enjoyable
and we all learnt a lot”.
We introduced a number of new volunteer roles
during 2019 which included staff and manager
coaches, workplace mediators and workplace
investigators. These roles have provided new ways of
supporting and developing our staff and managers,
as well as helping to reduce the burden placed upon
them in having to manage particular issues within the
organisation, in addition to their normal day-to-day
duties and responsibilities.
The volunteer coaching programme has been
particularly popular with considerable positive
feedback from the 28 managers who had access to a
professional coach during 2019. The programme has
continued into 2020.
Sharing our skills and expertise
We are involved in palliative care across the globe. As a leader in the hospice sector, our staff are regularly requested to give presentations and contribute to academic literature.
In February 2020, representatives from the hospice travelled to Kerala, India. They worked with 38 other people from 13 countries at the Institute of Palliative Medicine (IPM) – a World Health Organization collaborating centre for community participation in palliative and long-term care. They helped leaders develop effective and sustainable palliative care services in low- and middle-income countries as part of a sixmonth fellowship.
Our Quality End of Life Care for All (QELCA©) programme is designed to support the development of skills and confidence in those new to or unfamiliar with palliative care. In the last year, QELCA© has been delivered to 32 staff working as part of the London Ambulance Service funded by Health Education England and Macmillan. Further afield, in mid-Nottinghamshire, the Better Together partnership has been set up as a new satellite centre delivering QELCA© on our behalf. QELCA© has a presence in South Korea, Brazil and China, and is anticipated in Australia and Argentina. The beginning of our work in Georgia and Romania is promising and we’re excited to see what happens there in the coming year.
Sharing our emerging knowledge has always been an aspiration on the part of St Christopher’s as a leader in the hospice sector. The last year has seen national and international keynote presentations from different members of the hospice team as far flung as the USA, the Czech Republic, Slovenia and Denmark.
Staff within the hospice are mentors on various global learning programmes as well as national leadership programmes. Members of staff have contributed to a number of academic journals over the past year, including Progress in Palliative Care, BMC Palliative Care, BMJ Supportive and Palliative Care and the International Journal of Palliative Nursing. Additionally, staff members have contributed to EAPC conferences, blogs and papers.
Learning together locally
Alongside Greenwich and Bexley Community Hospice we’ve created the Hospice Education Learning Partnership (HELP) to provide education and training in end of life care.
One of our most exciting developments in the course of the last year was the development of the Hospice Education Learning Partnership (HELP) with Greenwich & Bexley Community Hospice. We joined forces to provide education and training across south east London and Croydon for care homes, hospitals, community teams and even prisons. By bringing together complementary skills and resources, we can reach more people with greater effectiveness.
Since HELP was established, we have provided training to 1,169 delegates, improving care in a variety of settings. We are using a virtual method called Project ECHO (Extension of Community Healthcare Outcomes) to develop new communities of learning, through which we aim to share best practice and empower participants through their membership. Such communities have already been established in over 100 local homes and we want to extend this further in the coming year.
To support our care home partners during the Covid-19 pandemic, we provided online access to recorded training sessions for staff and sent out a weekly compilation of pertinent advice and guidance from the government, regulatory and other professional bodies.
A fresh approach to education
Our new Centre for Awareness & Response into End of life (CARE) is coming soon.
Despite the challenges of Covid-19, building work has continued on our new Centre for Awareness & Response into End of Life (CARE), as has strategic planning about how best to use the new space. Funding has been approved to employ a training lead for carers, and to create an oral history project and a virtual tour that details Dame Cicely Saunders’ life and work. Construction on our new centre is due to be completed in autumn 2020 with a grand opening planned for the following year. We were also fortunate to receive probono support from leading creative agency, Ogilvy, in the last year. The team there have been working closely with us to develop the name of our new building (St Christopher’s CARE), manifesto, visual identity and wider campaigns to maximise its impact.
“When you’re told you have a year to live, it’s the hospital that delivers the blow but it’s St Christopher’s that pick up the pieces”
Joe shared his experience of dying and St Christopher’s with The Guardian, and over a quarter of a million people
Empowering the public
around death, dying and loss
It can be difficult and uncomfortable to talk, think and make plans for end of life. We’re working to help more people feel able to confront these challenges and plan for the future.
Inspiring community action
Our community action has been crucial in our response to the coronavirus pandemic and we are excited to develop this aspect or our service in the future.
Over the last few years we have made great advances around community action, including the development of new programmes that involve local people in end of life initiatives. However, we know we need to do far more to realise the full impact of these initiatives and so, last year, we appointed a Community Action Lead to coordinate and develop our initiatives in a more strategic and effective way.
The value of this post has been clearly demonstrated throughout the course of the Covid-19 pandemic, which saw the development of a significant community aid programme. This programme provided support to relieve social isolation for 123 people and deliveries of 712 essential food packages and medication.
Promoting death awareness locally
Beginning conversations with people about end of life care and advance care planning is always easier when these ideas are already part of the public conversation.
Creating Conversations in Croydon supported 54 community events in the last year, recording 925 engagements with members of the public about the topics of death and dying.
Lewisham residents had the opportunity to experience an interactive installation entitled ‘The Departure Lounge’ in the local shopping centre. Initiated by the Academy of Medical Sciences and supported by St Christopher’s, the project was visited by over 2,500 people and received national coverage by a range of media outlets. Staff members and volunteers from the hospice took part in recorded interviews which were available for people to listen to at the installation and on the website.
In Lambeth we are part of a broad collaboration focused on making the process of advance care planning accessible for Lambeth’s diverse communities. We have trained 60 volunteers who will support local people to document their wishes and decisions about treatment and care. This is a three year programme supported by the National Lottery.
Our efforts to encourage public engagement in end of life were also evident during Dying Matters Week with the public screening of the BBC’s Horizon documentary ‘We Need to Talk About Death’, which was filmed at St Christopher’s and originally aired in 2018.
Promoting death awareness nationally
Our staff, supporters, patients and volunteers have spoken about death, dying and grief with a number of media outlets.
Other media events include a Radio 4 programme focused on facing death creatively, which featured our Community Artist. One of our patients, Joe Morris, also appeared on The Guardian website and YouTube channel, in a series titled ‘Death Land’, in which he shared his thoughts on dying. The video has over 260,000 views online, the second highest number for the series.
Our Care Director appeared on Channel 5 News to speak about the need to plan for end of life, while the support of comedian Tom Allen invited engagement with our supporters following an article in our Connections newsletter encouraging open conversation around death and dying. We hope to work further with him in the future.
Supporting local projects
We want to give members of the public the training and support so they can reach out to neighbours, friends and others in their community who are seriously ill, bereaved or caring for someone who is dying.
Compassionate Neighbours match trained volunteers with someone who is seriously ill or at the end of life and socially isolated, who seeks a new friendship. In the course of the last year, 36 people were supported by 41 compassionate neighbours and 22 neighbours have been recruited and trained.
Coach4Care recruits people who have been carers of someone in the past and who are now interested in coaching a current carer, who will face many of the same challenges and demands. This project gained momentum last year and 36 coaches were recruited and trained, 60 carers were referred and 33 received coaching. The participants in both programmes have been invaluable in the response made by the hospice to the Covid-19 pandemic, forming the backbone of the community aid response.
Thinking deeper about death
We are fortunate to have a senior clinical academic as part of our team who has significant expertise related to new public health approaches in end of life care.
Our senior clinical academic is widely published and has presented her work at a number of national and international meetings this year – sharing learning from St Christopher’s and beyond to develop new thinking about ways of addressing end of life at a population level in the future.
“It feels good to do something for other people and if life deals you an ace card, you should give something back”
Mark and Peter covered 350 miles from London to Amsterdam to raise money for the hospice visit
Ensuring our long-term
sustainability
With approximately one third of our total income currently provided by the NHS, it’s crucial that we develop new ways to increase our funding and make sure we’re here for years to come.
Funding
Ensuring that St Christopher’s will be here for future generations is, in no small part, about the creation and careful management of financial resources.
In the course of the last year, three new shops have opened, bringing the total number up to 26. Our retail offer has become increasingly strong in recent years, with an increased income of £4,194k compared to £3,144k last year, and we hope that the addition of shops in Lewisham, Crystal Palace and Biggin Hill will continue to improve income in this area. In its opening weekend our Crystal Palace shop made over £7k in sales – a record figure for our Retail Team.
We know that we must find new income streams beyond those traditionally drawn on by the hospice. Our Head of Retail has recently been appointed as our Director of Commercial Projects. He will continue to have some oversight of the shops and will also focus on identifying new income streams and forging new commercial partnerships. In addition, we are now renting out part of our premises in Orpington to Bromley Healthcare, with whom we work closely at a clinical level. This not only strengthens our relationship with them, but also brings in additional income.
Earlier this year, after negotiations with the NHS about the substantial services that we provide, the NHS agreed an increase to our core funding; we also received a one-off cash boost of approximately £0.5m, this being our share of the £25m funding promised by the Prime Minister towards hospices nationwide in August 2019. All these increases reflect the significant impact that St Christopher’s has in providing palliative care across south east London.
On a sadder note, it is a source of regret that we have decided to close our Personal Care business during 2020/21. Unfortunately, despite our best efforts, we were not able to make the business financially viable. However, we take comfort in the knowledge that the service has been able to provide care for those patients and families in great need, since it was started in 2014.
Fundraising
With your support we were able to raise a huge amount of money this year. We are pleased to say that many of our fundraising events improved on the amount they raised at the same event last year.
The Fundraising Team met their targets this year, with significant money raised at major events such as the London to Amsterdam cycle in which 57 cyclists travelled 350 miles, raising over £185k for the hospice. Other successes were our fundraisers in the 2019 London Marathon who raised a phenomenal £65k (over £10k more than the previous year) and our Christmas Market which raised around £15k. It isn’t just the events that we organise that keep the hospice going; our committed base of supporters run their own independent events. Last year these supporter events raised £196k – about £15k more than the previous year.
Our annual dinner at the Goldsmiths’ Hall welcomed Sir Oliver Letwin as the keynote speaker. The dinner provided the opportunity to explain the work of St Christopher’s to a room of influential people in the worlds of finance and law, with the aim of gaining access to much-needed trust funding. As well as the £70k raised in the course of the evening, gifts raised as result of the contacts at the dinner through trusts and foundations totalled around £130k.
Long-term reliance on legacies continues. To improve our income in this area, we will be delivering a more strategic approach to legacy giving at St Christopher’s to harness the power of in-memory giving as a means to steward potential legators. The income provided from gifts in Wills accounts for around half of the money we raise each year from fundraising, and so it is imperative that we speak to people about leaving us a gift in their Will, however big or small, and convey our thanks to those who consider our future in this way.
Ambitions 2020-23
Our Ambitions will guide the development of our services and wider activities over the next three years. We hope you are inspired by our plans for the future and that we can rely on your support to make these a reality. Working together, we can and will improve end of life care across south London and beyond.
We’ve got a lot to do to eradicate suffering at the end of life. By 2030 the number of annual deaths is predicted to increase by 17% (Gomes and Higginson – England and Wales), meaning many more people will need our support.
So we will need to adapt our services to respond to this ever-growing demand. We also know that by 2037, nine million people will be caring for a family member, friend or neighbour at home in the UK (Carers UK Policy Briefing 2014). So our training must extend to members of the public who will need guidance and support to cope with the demanding responsibilities of caring for their mum, dad or sister at the end of their lives
The proportion of people dying in care homes will grow significantly, inviting more input from the hospice in that setting. We recognise other similar opportunities to work in partnership – with colleagues in hospitals, primary care and other healthcare settings to improve the experience of end of life.
Our Ambitions will only become a reality if we ensure they are considered in the light of three key themes: community, sustainability and inclusivity.
Adapt our care services to meet people’s changing needs to…
…improve
people’s
experience of
end of life locally
Invest in hospice-led innovation related to death, dying and loss to…
…strengthen hospices’ contribution nationally
Increase public and professional confidence and knowledge about end of life to…
…transform end of life care globally
Our ambitions and
supporting themes
The graphic below illustrates our key themes in detail and indicates how they fit alongside our wider vision and ambitions as an organisation. We have identified set targets for each of our Ambitions and will report on our progress against these each year in our annual report and accounts. Find out how we’ve been getting on in next year’s annual review!
More information
Who’s who
For information about our Executive Team and to find out who’s on our Board of Trustees, just click on the button below.
Get involved
Could you help St Christopher’s make a difference? If you can give your time, money or expertise we’d love to hear from you.