St Giles Hospice workforce changes amid hospice funding crisis
With a financial crisis looming over the hospice sector, St Giles Hospice, like many hospices nationally, is facing a number of challenges.
The landscape in which hospices operate is evolving and St Giles needs to adapt to keep up with changes and challenges currently being faced in palliative and end of life care, whilst ensuring good financial management.
To achieve this a review of the way in which we deliver our services, and the workforce required, was critical.
St Giles Hospice remains fully committed to providing outstanding end of life care to local people, and their loved ones, where and when they need it.
Workforce changes
In August, we announced proposals to make significant redundancies across our workforce. At that point in time, the proposals were to cut approximately 40 full-time roles – around 15% of our workforce. Now that we have concluded the processes of both collective and individual consultation, we can confirm that our workforce changes have resulted in 21 people leaving St Giles through redundancy. Understandably, given this has been an unsettling period of change, we have also seen a number of colleagues leave the organisation through resignation.
Bed provision
At St Giles, we aim to support our community’s palliative and end of life care needs however we can, as well as support our colleagues in the NHS and wider health and care system. Financial pressures mean we must now focus on our very core specialist palliative care services.
We have now reduced our Inpatient Unit bed provision from 23 to 15 beds. This includes the ceasing of Continuing Health Care beds and Accelerated Discharge beds, for which funding ended in June this year. Going forwards, we will continue to operate 12 specialist palliative care beds, as we have always done, along with three end of life care beds, with our Family Support and Bereavement team working closely with our inpatient care teams.
We have consolidated our community care provision in order to create a seamless journey for our patients. Specifically, we have retained and combined our Advice and Referrals Centre, Hospice at Home, Respite and Community nursing services. We are now looking at how we best work to ensure both our home visits and out-patient services operate as effectively as possible.
In line with these changes, we have reviewed and updated our patient referrals criteria.
This is a profoundly difficult time for St Giles and for the countless patients and families who rely on our services. The decision to reduce our workforce and bed capacity has been agonising and we ask our health and social care partners to bear with us whist we continue to navigate this difficult and unsettling time for the hospice with the aim to maintain our service provision.
Our commitment to providing outstanding end of life care remains unwavering, but we must operate within our financial means to safeguard the future of our services and ensure the long-term survival of St Giles.
We are incredibly grateful to everyone who helps to fund the care delivered by St Giles – whether that be funding from our NHS colleagues, charitable income from our donors, lottery players or our loyal shoppers – your continued support remains vital for our future.
We recognise that the local NHS and its social care partners are in a difficult position, with significant funding challenges themselves. We will continue to work collaboratively with the NHS and other local partners but must also make the decisions required of an independent charity.
This has been a period of great uncertainty for our workforce and the wellbeing of our staff, volunteers, patients, and families is paramount. Whilst these decisions have been very difficult to make, the long-term future of St Giles is at their heart, and we ask for your continued support as we navigate this challenging time.
