Weldmar to launch new at-home care service

A fundraising appeal is underway to help more people live out their final days how they wish.

Weldmar Hospicecare is launching ‘Weldmar at Home’, a new service described as the local charity’s biggest ever development in patient care, and has launched a major fundraising appeal to help finance it.

Working in partnership with Weldmar Community Nurses, the Weldmar at Home team will ensure that care is available in the home, when it is needed, to provide hands on nursing care and support to patients, regardless of diagnosis, who wish to be in their own home for the final days of their life.

To meet these wishes, individualised care packages are often required, and sadly there is frequently a shortage of carers available to provide a reliable and consistent service at short notice.

Demand is rising too, as last year alone 46% of Weldmar patients wanted this care, an increase of 11%.

Caroline Sweetland, Director of Nursing at Weldmar Hospicecare, says, “When patients are living with a terminal diagnosis, they need the reassurance that no matter where or how they want to receive care and support, it will be available. Patients often require rapid specialist assessments and appropriate care packages being implemented within hours. For some patients this has been taking days, or even weeks, which just simply is not acceptable. The Covid-19 pandemic has made this even worse. Many of our patients don’t have the time to wait for a full package of care to be in place. In the meantime, if their health deteriorates rapidly, they are admitted to hospital instead of being able to stay in their own home. This can hopefully be avoided if an appropriate and necessary care package can be put in place quickly.

“We provide hands on care to the patients when they are in our Inpatient Unit. Now that we are finding that many people would prefer to stay at home to die, we want to be able to extend this hands on care there too, especially in the last few weeks when it can be so tiring for families.”

“We continue to work closely with a number of other health care agencies in Dorset to fulfill our patients’ wishes, but we want to be able to ensure that every patient who wants to die at home receives the level of care that they deserve, provided by a charity that they already trust, respect and feel comfortable with.”

A major fundraising appeal has been launched today by Weldmar Hospicecare to fund the new service and a team of Health Care Assistants, and donations can be made securely and easily at weld-hospice.org.uk.