'The hospice were there for her': in conversation with Alison Steadman

So welcome to the Hospice UK garden of compassion.

It's great to be here.

Lovely.

We were just chatting earlier about the importance of gardens and nature and your effect, its effect on you and and your health and just wondered what your thoughts are about gardens and health?

Well, I think gardeners are so important because as soon as you go into a garden, you see the flowers, you hear birds, you see the bees buzzing around, you immediately relax, especially if you've been in an environment, say a hospital environment or you've been receiving treatment or whatever.

And it's, it's not very nice and it's stressful suddenly to be brought into a space like this.

You can sit on one of these benches and just relax and there's water and all these things that make us feel loved.

I think nature does make you feel loved, and if every Hospice has one of these gardens that patients can be either wheeled out or they can just wander into themselves, it'll make a huge difference to them.

And have you had much to do with Hospice care?

Well, my mother died quite a few years ago now.

She had pancreatic cancer and and she received Hospice care.

Yes, she did.

And it meant a lot.

And I had a friend died fairly recently, and again, she needed Hospice care.

And I went to see her a couple of times in the Hospice, and they were so welcoming and it was so nice.

And, you know, the care that she was getting, they were there for her.

Yeah.

I think our NHS, I mean nurses and doctors are working so hard, but it just isn't enough money and, you know, investments and hospitals.

And so hospices do come in, you know, for end of life care when it's really necessary and makes all the difference.

It's one of the things that we find surprising as Hospice UK is that hospices get very little, a very small proportion of their funding from the government, which is so surprising isn't it, when you think if that existed for maternity, we'd all be up in arms. But when we had something at the end of life that only gets really just a small proportion funded and everybody else has to rally round.

Yes!

And you're working so hard to raise funds, get funds from anywhere, from anyone.

You know, it's, it's, it shouldn't have to be like that because we're all going to die, aren't we?

And we don't know how and we don't know when, but we, we, you know, we need people around us and we need that care.