Providing palliative and end of life care to adults living with life-limiting or terminal illness, St Barnabas Hospice offers outstanding care delivery to the people of Lincolnshire. The charity has received over £15,000 in funding which will be used to introduce virtual receptionist units across day centres in the Lincolnshire area and provide support to staff and patients.
After seeing an increase of 13% of patient referrals over the course of the pandemic, it was clear to the team that the day centres needed to be open for longer hours and more staff were required. Therefore, the team came up with the solution of installing virtual receptionist and check in units at their sites, allowing patients to have an immediate response to their needs and continuing to provide an essential service ensuring greatest benefit to patients.
The charity received the grant from the £1 million Community Support Fund established by leading food company Moy Park in 2020 to support organisations local to its operations across Europe. Richard Aldous, Moy Park recently attended the opening of the brand-new flagship wellbeing centre in Boston which was officially opened by Professor Sir Jonathan Van Tam where they viewed the facilities and the services on offer.
St. John Sutcliffe, Director of Finance & Performance said,
“We are delighted to be awarded this amazing sum of money from the Moy Park Community Support Fund. This grant supports the exciting introduction of three virtual reception units into our Wellbeing Centres at Boston, Grantham, and Louth. The virtual reception units will complement our existing reception staff, enabling us to work in much more flexible and efficient ways such as alerting the main switch board in our in-patient unit that a patient has arrived via the door entry access. This tightens safeguarding along with improving our general fire safety. Virtual receptionists allow a patient to have an immediate response to their need, via either a touch screen, telephone call or facetime conversation from the interactive device. In combination with a receptionist on clinical days, the introduction of more communication methods will only enhance our service delivery to the patients of Lincolnshire and we are extremely grateful to Moy Park, for enabling this vision to be a reality.”
Operating for 40 years, St Barnabas provides care and support services for the terminally ill, offering physical, psychological and spiritual support to patients. The hospice has also opened out their care to support individuals in the wider Lincolnshire area by operating a bereavement line, for all people affected by loss, offering support and consistency for our community when they need us the most.”
Applications to apply for a grant from the Moy Park Community Support Fund can be made via Moy Park’s website: https://moypark.com/community-support.
Richard Aldous, Moy Park pictured alongside Deborah Holland, Health, and Rehabilitation Support Worker.
Richard Aldous, Moy Park pictured with St. John Sutcliffe, Director of Finance & Performance and Professor Jonathan Van Tam at the opening of the new St Barnabas wellbeing centre in Boston.
