Ashgate Hospicecare

Coronavirus: guidance on visiting our hospice

In our ongoing attempt to protect our patients, their relatives, hardworking staff, volunteers and the wider community from Coronavirus (COVID-19), while at the same time allowing our patients to spend precious time with their loved ones, we have revised our restrictions on the numbers of visitors each patient can have at any one time.

Rather than having only one named visitor per patient, each of our patients can now have two named adult visitors. Only children (aged under 18) of the patient will be admitted and they must enter the hospice via patio doors directly into their parent’s bedroom. We will also be asking all visitors to the Inpatient Unit to wear their own face covering, which they should bring with them if possible and put on either before entering the Inpatient Unit corridor. The hospice remains open for visitors 24 hours a day. To keep the risk of spread of infection to a minimum, all visitors will be temperature checked on arrival. Anyone with a high temperature signifying illness will not be able to enter the hospice.

Find out more

Visit the NHS website

Ashgate Hospicecare seeks voluntary redundancies and tells staff it cannot rule out making compulsory job cuts

Chief Executive Barbara-Anne Walker says: “The worrying reality is that at a time of pandemic - when the compassionate end of life care we provide could hardly be more important - our funding has never been more precarious. We are not a NHS hospice. Less than 30% of our income comes from health budgets which is not nearly enough to pay for our specialist end of life care. Without adequate, sustainable and long-term funding, we will need to implement compulsory redundancies. This is clearly not something we want to have to do and we are seeking all alternatives to avoid that."

We're very excited to be launching...

The Life and Death Podcast

Your host, Stephen Rumford, senior physiotherapist at Ashgate Hospicecare, brings together patients and professionals to chat about their unique relationships, hospice life, and dying well. Each episode follows a different pair and another side of hospice life.

Our shops and coffee shops are now open

Please click on the links below to find out more about the phased reopening of our shops, what measures we are putting in place to keep everybody safe and information about donating items to the hospice. It was important to us that we reopened our shops and coffee shops because they are a very valuable revenue stream for us – contributing 29% of our total income in any one year.