Closing Bristol hospice 'sad but crucial'

Vice-chairman and trustee of St Peter's Hospice Robert Bourns is the son of the charity's founders and saw his parents' efforts to set up the organisation. Here he explains why he believes the decision to close the Knowle building will help secure the charity's future.

The announcement that the St Peter's Hospice building in Knowle is to close by the end of the year has brought a mix of reactions from anger and sadness, to disbelief. How can such a thing be allowed to happen to Bristol's best loved charity?

My parents Herbert and Joan Bourns alongside Andrew Urquhart and other founders had the vision more than 30 years ago to start this fantastic organisation and were very much involved in its development.

Andrew became the hospice's first chairman in the late 1970s and led the organisation's growth for many years.

My mother established the first support group and started the Friends of St Peter's Hospice, helping to build the community-wide support that was and still is so important to the work of the hospice.

I and the other trustees of St Peter's Hospice volunteer our time and hold the provision of hospice care in Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire dear to our hearts. We recognise the great work done by St Peter's. It is a centre of excellence for the control of symptoms and pain and the provision of complete care, focused on the support of the individual and their family.

The patient and the family are at the centre of all St Peter's does and 85 per cent of the care and support provided is to people in their homes, as it was in the early days of the charity, before we had acquired and adapted our building at Knowle.

Hospice care has always been more than the provision of a bed in a building.

The knowledge and expertise accumulated, is to be found, not in buildings, but in the people working within St Peter's whether that be the Community Nursing Team, Hospice at Home (all working in people's homes), to those teaching and sharing knowledge with nursing and other professionals as to how best to control symptoms in their places of work (hospitals, care and nursing homes as well as GP practices).

The work they do is invaluable and should not be jeopardised because of the affection we all feel for this well-loved building.

Due to the current economic climate we recognised at the beginning of the year that there had been a dramatic fall in income (through our investments and legacies) and that the Knowle building required several hundreds of thousands of pounds to be spent on it during the next 12 to 18 months to keep it fit for purpose.

Closing Knowle was a tough and very sad decision but one we needed to take to secure the future of St Peter's.

Over the years, with the support of the local population, St Peter's Hospice has drawn together a range of professional and other services that ensure the care provided is complete.

Most patients choose to be looked after and supported, even at the end of their life, in their homes.

The decision that has been made enables St Peter's to continue to provide full hospice care for the population of greater Bristol. No area has been abandoned.

We are determined that this should continue into the future.

We recognise that demands for care and potential funding arrangements will change over time and are determined that St Peter's should remain responsive to the needs of our community and able to anticipate and respond to those needs as they change.

First and foremost we rely on and would do nothing deliberately to damage the support St Peter's receives from the community.

My earliest memories of St Peter's predate the hospice. I remember my parents going around with others about 36 years ago. They spent a lot of time talking to GPs, the council and other people about what hospice care meant, what the concept was and why it was, therefore, that people should be prepared to support in principle.

My father was somebody, as a surgeon, who spent a lot of time providing care to people with cancer at a time when cancer treatment was very much surgically-based, and a belief that people did not need to suffer pain in the way they were and that symptoms could be controlled. That is what the hospice was.

When we got to the point where it was possible to fund a nurse and domiciliary care in patients' homes and that is where things really started to get moving.

People got behind St Peter's clinically and people benefited from receiving that care and it became an important part of that constituency.

The support provided to the hospice by the community has always been very important.

Hospice care is not something that started as a bed in a building, although that is an incredibly important part of it, but not the major part of it.

When looking at limited resources you have to think what is most important and how do we provide it. We can do it by what we are proposing and what we are implementing at the moment.

If people thought we had lost faith in the population of greater Bristol it would be very serious and very damaging and would therefore limit the ability of the hospice to provide care for patients. The decision at the moment has an impact on care but does not actually reduce the level of care we provide.

It is about looking forward, whoever started this off, they were looking ahead at what could be provided and what could be needed.