More people living with an incurable illness are set to benefit from our new community nursing service, launched as part of a major review of care provision.

We now care for four out of five patients in their homes, as opposed to on our wards, and have developed our Living Well strategy in response.

For our community nursing service this means specialist nurses paying regular visits to patients in their homes can now provide hands-on clinical care instead of just an advisory service. This means patients are better supported, as well as GPs and District Nurses.

Our new Outreach service, formerly called Clinical Nurse Specialists, started in December and follows a previous enhancement of our in-the-home care package. In all, the changes mean patients living at home have access to our specialist care teams around the clock.

Becky Richardson, deputy director of care and matron for community services at Severn Hospice, said: “Our aim at the hospice is to provide the best possible care for as many people as possible irrespective of location or diagnosis. We have spent many months looking at how we can future-proof our community provision and the launch of the new Outreach service and its integration with other services is the result of that.

“The difference it means is that more patients will have access to the care they need, helping them stay at home and avoid unnecessary admissions to hospital.

“The changes form part of our wider strategy to invest and expand our community services enabling us to better meet the needs of the people of Shropshire and Mid Wales.”

More than 2,100 people were referred to our hospice for the first time last year, of which four in five received their care while still at home.

Latest figures from Public Health England show that around one in ten adults in the Telford and Wrekin district being cared for at the end of their life are hospice patients. For Shropshire, the figure is 7.5 per cent. Nationally, the figures show that on average hospices care for just one in 20 people at the end of their life.

Paul Cronin, Severn Hospice chief executive, said: “We are the only adult hospice service in Shropshire and Telford and Wrekin so these figures underline how important and how successful our strategy has been in providing care to people in the community. However demand for our services is growing each year and we need to expand our services accordingly.

“We are caring for more patients each year than ever before; we care for more of them at home than in our buildings and we are caring for more people for longer.

“This is what’s driving our Living Well strategy and why we are enhancing our at home provision and building in community services to our future plans.”