Each month we catch up one of our amazing community partners. This month we speak to St Joseph’s Hospice who deliver essential care services to the east London community.

St Joseph’s Hospice opened its doors 115 years ago but its story begins even earlier when five Sisters of Charity arrived from Dublin in 1900 to help the poor and dying of East London. Five years later and with the help of a wealthy Jewish benefactor, the Sisters were able to secure a premises, and the doors of St Joseph’s Hospice were opened and remain firmly open to this day.

Today the Hospice serves three core areas, City and Hackney, Tower Hamlets and Newham, with an additional nine boroughs through Haringey and as far as Camden, with a total catchment area in access of 4 million metropolitan Londoners. Its core boroughs are among some of the most diverse in the country, over half of its patients are BAMER and on any given day there can be 42 different languages spoken by staff, patients, visitors and callers. More than a third of the hospice’s patients are at or below the poverty threshold, which is higher than average for Greater London.

What does St Joseph’s Hospice do?
St Joseph’s Hospice provides specialist palliative care to people with life-limiting illness. We support and care for over 6,500 people each year and help more than 12,000 who telephone seeking practical advice, guidance and support.

We have a wide range of services for different people at different stages of their diagnosis. Our inpatient unit has 34 beds including four respite beds where we provide inpatient palliative and end-of-life care. It may surprise you to know that around half of our patients go home after receiving symptom or pain management.

For people who are living well with their illness and want to socialise with others in a similar situation, we have a Day Hospice service which is social, fun and there is also nursing support on hand if it’s needed.

A lot of the work we do today is in the community where we visit people in their own homes, providing specialist care and advice. We take a holistic approach to our care so we provide spiritual and psychological support, complementary therapy for patients and their families and tools and training for carers. As leaders in the field of palliative care we also do a lot of social outreach and community networking on end-of-life care.

Who pays for the service?
All of our services are free of charge to our patients but it costs around £14 million every year to run St Joseph’s Hospice. The NHS only covers just over half of what we need so we need to raise the rest, over £6 million which is a challenge.

What are the challenges facing St Joseph’s Hospice?
Like all charities, we rely on charitable giving and fundraising from the public, corporations as well as from trust and grant-giving bodies to help keep the Hospice running. We know that the demand for palliative care services will increase by 40% over the next 25 years and we need to be ready to meet that demand.

We would like to engage with more corporate partners, particularly in the City, not just through volunteering, which they are brilliant at, but through employee engagement and, we hope, by supporting us financially. Speak to anyone who lives in East London and you will find that most of them have relatives or friends who have used our services. They too may need us one day but one thing is for sure, when they need us we’ll be here, hopefully for at least another 115 years!