Hospice in cash fight

Mar 13 2008 by Andrew Baldwin, Huddersfield Daily Examiner

KIRKWOOD Hospice in Huddersfield has provided care for the dying and their families for more than 20 years.

For those who do not want to spend their final days on a hospital ward it is a place where their every need can be taken care of in a homely environment.

The testimonies of those who have seen their loved ones spend their dying days there speak volumes for the hospice. It is, they say, magnificent in the way it manages what is always a difficult and emotionally-fraught situation.

All power then to the teams who have raised £1m in under a year at the hospice’s 11 charity shops.

And good on the shop customers and the people who donate items for sale.

It’s a magnificent achievement and goes a long way towards the £2.7m which has to be raised each year in order for the hospice to carry on providing services to desperately-ill people.

But it does raise the question: Why so very little Government support for these fine institutions?

We all know that scarcely a day slips by without another overwhelming need emerging for funding from the increasingly hard-pressed resources of the NHS.

But surely there is more than enough money in the Treasury coffers to help give Kirkwood Hospice and others like it the future they so thoroughly deserve.