Bristol hospice closes due to lack of funds

St Peter's Hospice has announced that it will close its Knowle site to patients later this year because of a lack of funds.

Managers at the charity, which supports terminally ill adults, said they had been forced to review their situation because the recession has left them about £500,000 short of the £5.5 million annual running costs.

But they say they will continue to support as many people as they do currently at their Brentry site and in the community.

The Bristol Evening Post revealed in April the city's only adult hospice charity was undertaking a review of its services, with the future of the Knowle site at risk on cost grounds.

The charity has now confirmed that at a meeting of trustees last week the decision was taken to close the building at Knowle.

St Peter's chief executive Sandie Foxall-Smith said the building, which is about 112 years old, needs about £300,000 spent on it to patch it up and make it fit for purpose over the next 12 to 18 months.

Closing Knowle will save the organisation more than £500,000 a year, so that it can focus on securing the charity's future.

St Peter's Hospice was launched in the city 31 years ago, originally with a team of community nurses from Lawrence Hill health centre. They moved to the St Agnes Avenue site in May 1980.

The charity has found that legacy funding and investments have suffered as the recession has taken hold and house prices have dropped and trustees are keen to see work carried out to protect its future.

It has called on people across Bristol to continue to support it through this difficult financial period.

Staff and volunteers were told of the decision in a series of meetings yesterday.

About 10 to 20 redundancies from the 300 staff across the organisation are likely to be made as a result of the closure, mainly in catering and domestic roles.

The hospice hopes that as many care staff as possible will want to remain in their jobs, and either move to Brentry or work in the community.

Previously the charity suggested they might build a new hospice on the Hengrove Park site near the proposed community hospital but a decision is yet to be made on this.

Inpatient and day hospice services will move to the purpose-built Brentry site by the end of this year, with changes due to be made to the site to increase its capacity to enable 5,000 day hospice visits and 558 inpatients a year.

Ms Foxall-Smith said that reviews over the last six months had put patients at the heart of their decisions. She said that more people want to die in their own homes and by diverting staff from the Knowle hospice they will be able to provide more care in the community. She also said people using the hospice now tend to be more sick than they were years ago.

Ms Foxall-Smith said: "In the inpatient unit most patients are with us for nine to 10 days. The other 85 per cent of our care is out there in the community, whether it is a nurse popping in or someone helping with pain relief, answering a phone call, arranging for a bed to be delivered or talking to relatives. All that is not delivered in the hospice.

"It became very expensive to have the two facilities and if we do not spend that amount of money we could put it into care. We are trying to consolidate for now to get into a slightly better financial position than we are.

"We are still looking at other opportunities. Once we are on one site we will get a better feeling and understanding and if there is a need in South Bristol we will review that.

"First and foremost we have to financially secure our future.

"We know that people are fond of Knowle, and it is going to be difficult, but St Peter's did not start there, it started in Lawrence Hill, in the community."

St Peter's plans to keep a presence in south Bristol as a base for its nursing teams because charity bosses do not want supporters to feel they are neglecting their heritage.

Ms Foxall-Smith said patients and relatives from the south of the city would be given help in reaching Brentry.

St Peter's will not move to "cook chill" food - meals which have been prepared elsewhere and reheated in its kitchens - as had been previously suggested.

Ms Foxall-Smith said that they had considered the change but decided that it would be better for patients if they kept to food produced on site.

One of the trustees and vice chairman Robert Bourns, whose late mother Joan was a founder of the hospice, said that St Peter's started before Knowle and it is more important that the organisation survives than a building remains."

Mr Bourns said: "I think it is a huge change but I am sure that it is the right thing to do to secure the service provision. "When I became a trustee I was very conscious that a very significant proportion of our service was about support at home, palliative care, respite care and care in the community rather than a physical institution in a building.

"We are interested in and concerned for the future of funding. It is a service that needs to be delivered in the longer term."

A member of staff, who wished to remain anonymous, said employees were unhappy with the decision.

She said: "People are hurt, there are going to be a lot of people who cannot get to Brentry and may lose their jobs because of that.

"I believe that if the people of south Bristol knew, they would step in to save the hospice."