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A loving wife has described the care given to her husband as part of a hospice’s well-being programme.
Larry Robins, aged 71 and from Kempsey, started coming to creative therapy and adapted t’ai chi sessions at St Richard’s Hospice, after visiting an open day in 2017.
The sessions are part of the hospice’s Living Well programme which aims to help people with a life-limiting illness learn new skills and techniques to manage their symptoms at home.
Mr Robins, who is a retired postman, has non-specific Parkinson’s disease and has also received physiotherapy and occupational therapy support at the hospice.
“It is social – he is interacting with other people and that is what he needs,” explained his wife, Carole Robins.
“Larry can’t communicate. He understands, he just can’t speak. When we come here, they treat him like anybody else.
“That means he is not isolated. He is becoming isolated because he used to talk for England. He was always the first one to talk and now he can’t.”
Mrs Robins, who is 71, has been volunteering with the hospice since 2000. Her uncle was cared for on the hospice’s In-patient Unit in 2010.
She said: “It is a happy place. People say to me: ‘the hospice is where you go to die’ but I say: ‘no, it’s where you go to live as well you can for what time you have left’.”
Other courses available on the L
iving Well programme include: relaxation, coping with illness, fatigue management, managing breathlessness, sharing stories, complementary therapy and finding inner peace.
The programme aims to support people through education, exercise, therapies, creativity, relaxation, and group support.
Patients are encouraged to practice techniques to help gain the maximum benefit from the course and develop confidence to continue practising once it has come to an end.
To find out more visit www.strichards.org.uk/supporting-you-to-live-well/
St Richard’s Hospice provides free specialist palliative and end of life care for patients living with life-limiting illnesses and supports their loved ones. Each year the hospice team supports more than 3,000 patients, family members and bereaved people in Worcestershire.
The hospice strives to provide the best medical, practical, emotional and social support they can to help people live life to the fullest, as independently as they can, for as long as they can. They care for people with a range of illnesses including heart failure, Parkinson’s, and motor neurone disease as well as cancer.
St Richard’s has launched the Build 2020 Appeal which aims to raise the final £1.4m needed to build a bigger hospice, enabling more patients and families to be cared for in Worcestershire.
The total cost for expanding and redeveloping the existing building in Wildwood Drive, Worcester, is £5.3m.