St Giles Hospice provides an invaluable service

I learned so much I didn’t know when I met with their CEO and Deputy CEO this week…

The original St Giles Hospice is at Whittington near to Lichfield and there are also facilities in Walsall and Sutton Coldfield as well as community based services across the area.

I hadn’t realised exactly how St Giles Hospice had come about. I knew it began at the former St Giles Vicarage in Whittington but that was about it. 

In fact, in 1983, the then vicar, Reverend Canon Paul Brothwell, became concerned at the care available to terminally-ill patients in local hospitals and set about providing some beds in the vicarage for a few local people to be cared for in the most compassionate way possible.

Those early beginnings have grown into the modern St Giles Hospice we see today. The original principles remain unchanged and they now strive to offer specialist care in a variety of settings for patients with cancer or other serious illnesses, as well as providing support for their families and helpers.

It is the current scale and scope of their work which I was surprised about. I knew they are a major hospice service but hadn’t realised quite how big… one of the biggest in the country.

The ninety minutes I talked with Peter and Emma was immensely useful and a key element was around the need, and opportunity, for greater collaboration than ever before with NHS and Social Care services in Staffordshire.

Much of what we talked about sits very well with the ongoing work in Staffordshire to make the many different parts of the healthcare system here work and collaborate better together. We’ll be meeting again shortly to see how we can progress things.

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