Why hospice care is more than you think

Claire is a healthcare assistant at Isabel Hospice in Hertfordshire. She’s part of a team that looks after Isabel’s community, delivering vital palliative and end of life care in people’s own homes. 

Every year in the UK, hospices make 1.4 million visits to people in the community. People just like Linda, who was recently diagnosed with cancer. She wants to remain in her own home during her illness, to be in the place she loves, with the people who are most dear to her.

And it's hospice staff like Claire who make this happen. Along with colleagues from Isabel Hospice, she visits Linda most days, to make sure she is comfortable and has everything she needs to keep living well until the end.

Whilst the clinically trained staff can help with specialist medical care such as symptom management and pain relief, Claire can help with turning down beds, getting dressed, taking a bath – and all the day to day care that someone with a life-limiting or terminal illness might need. 

And the holistic care that hospices offer extends to what Claire does: listening, chatting, and revisiting happy memories. It might be having a sing song to someone’s wedding song, or belting out some karaoke to their favourite songs; playing cards, taking a patient out for a walk, or spending time in their garden. 

For Linda, it’s also about enabling her to do something she’s loved for a lifetime: her beloved sewing. In this film, we find Linda showing Claire how to sew, on her very first Singer sewing machine – surrounded by memories and mementoes of a happy life.

Whether Linda chooses to move into the hospice at the end of her life, or die in her own home, Claire and her team will be with her all the way, giving her choice, comfort, and dignity at the end.
 

In 2024-25 generalist palliative care nurses, healthcare assistants, social workers and carers from hospices made 780,00 home visits. And specialist palliative care doctors and nurses from hospices made 620,000 home visits*. Hundreds of thousands of visits from volunteers – like those in Compassionate Neighbours schemes – help hospice at home patients do the things they love most. 

With the right support, there is so much more they can do. So that’s why, this Hospice Care Week, we’re celebrating all the things that hospices do to make people’s live better in their own homes, and the hospice staff and volunteers who do them – to help show how vital they are.

From specialist medical care and pain relief, to sewing, gardening, and laughing – it’s all part of what makes hospice care more than you think.

*Hospice UK Hospice Activity Data Survey, UK, 2024-25
 

Thank you to players of People’s Postcode Lottery, who have raised £1 million for Hospice UK, for their incredible support.

Our sincere gratitude also to the team at Isabel Hospice, Claire Harding-Edwards, Rosalinda Finn and her husband John.