£100,000 a week down but Severn Hospice work must continue

"The effects of the Covid-19 emergency for Severn Hospice have been instant and far-reaching.

We have to raise £2 for every £3 we spend on care and almost overnight we lost almost all of our ability to generate that income.

Our 28 high street shops and our new eBay shop were closed overnight as we – willingly – observed the social distancing imperative and within a week we made the call to halt our planned fundraising events for the summer.

In addition, we had to instruct all of our fundraisers and support groups to stop their activity. Our key sources of charitable income were literally being turned off one by one. We calculate the impact is in the order of more than £100,000 a week.

At the same time, our services to patients had to continue – the pandemic hasn’t changed the rate at which people are diagnosed with incurable illnesses. In that first week of change, we had just shy of 250 families in our care. We exist for them so our priority remained their needs and their safety. We had already made operational changes to limit the risk of Covid-19 coming into our buildings with restrictions on visitors, asking all our volunteers to stay away, and extra hygiene precautions; now we needed to make much bigger changes.

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We stopped our day services and clinics, where people being looked after at home by our outreach community nurses come to our hospices for care. Four out of five of our patients are cared for at home and we have used this community nursing model to its best to ensure patients are still getting the care they need.

We are not doing this in isolation, of course, and continue to work closely with our NHS partners who are at the real sharp end in dealing with this emergency. We have agreed that we will support the local hospitals by taking onto our wards any patient who does not have Covid-19 but needs end of life care. This will help ease any bed capacity issues at our two main hospitals. This is not a usual practice but these are exceptional times and the hospice recognises the role it has in the community and its important contribution to overall healthcare.

Having lost our main sources of funding we had to adapt quickly. We are a resilient organisation and are doing what we can to help ourselves. We have stretched our resources, cut our costs where we can, diverted our reserves into cashflow, asked our landlords for rent waivers and been grateful for all the government support packages we are eligible to apply for.

The public’s response and thought for us has been absolutely fantastic throughout. We’ve asked them to support us from their sofa and the response has been universally positive. We’ve had more people join our lottery, more donations made online and our first ever virtual event – a quiz – raised more than £3,000. We’ve even had donations of PPE equipment as people recognise what is happening nationally is affecting everyone locally.

But as fortunate and grateful as we are to have generous and loyal supporters I can’t pretend it will fill the fundraising gap. We have been dealt a devastating blow by this virus and we now face a daily challenge for an indeterminate period of time.

We can’t stop caring and we will always need the public’s help to fulfil that commitment, now more than ever. Details of how people can support us from their sofa and help us right now are available on our website severnhospice.org.uk"

Heather Tudor, chief executive, Severn Hospice