St John’s Hospice, an independent charity that provides specialised palliative care to terminally ill patients and their families, has opened a new wellbeing centre.
The new centre was a collaboration between Facilitate Spaces, a UK-based design and build company, and Black Pine, a UK-based architect company, alongside St John’s Hospice staff and patients.
The refurbishment includes a redesign of the main space which can be partitioned to create multifunctional break-out rooms for smaller group activities or individual therapy sessions or used as one larger convivial room which will also be used to host new carer and bereavement support sessions out-of-hours.
A larger clinical room has been created to aid specialist nursing and medical care at the centre. This includes scaling up the provision of medical interventions such as drug therapies, infusions, and blood transfusions across the hospice.
The therapy rooms have been refurbished and a new multi-sensory room added, to better support and treat patients with Dementia, Alzheimer’s, and Motor Neurone disease.
lastly, the creation of a 1:1 counselling room has provided social workers with a new private space to support patients and their families throughout their journey at St John’s Hospice.
The private counselling room which has been named the 'Quiet Room' will be used by our social workers to provide support to patients and their families
As part of the project, the administrative office, which sits in the footprint below the centre, has also been refurbished creating a positive and professional space for staff. The much-needed changes to this space have not only created a more conducive work environment to better promote staff's own health and wellbeing but it will accommodate the growing team as services continue to expand.
The new administrative office features soundproof, private and professional offices for our Hospice Consultants, Referrals and Discharge Nurse Specialist and Assistant Director of Nursing.
Simon James, Chief Executive of St John’s Hospice said: “This marks the start of an exciting new chapter for our hospice. Thanks to the kind generosity of our donors, we now have a physical building which reflects the gold standard of care we provide and for which we are known in the community. It also reflects our commitment to the physical and mental health and wellbeing of not only our patients and their loved ones but also of our staff.”
