Wendy, Chair of The Hospice User Group (HUG)

Wendy Chairs our Hospice User Group (HUG) and volunteers for Flapjack and Feedback. She kindly shares her experience at the Charity:

How did you get involved with the Charity?

I came to the Lymphoedema service. This was when the Charity were first thinking of having a hospice user group. I spoke to a gentleman who was the Chair of HUG. He said, “Would you come and join us?”, so I said, “Certainly. If I can do anything to help, I’d be happy to do that”.

What do you enjoy about volunteering and being part of the Charity?

I’ve always been a nurse and I had to retire because I had a really bad back injury. I missed the patients and the teamwork that we had and it’s just nice being involved with patients again. I enjoy trying to find out how the service can be improved and talking to people to find out what their experiences are.

What is the Hospice User Group?

The Hospice User Group meets with the CEO, Sharon Allen, Sara Robins, Deputy CEO and Director of Clinical Services, myself, usually some of the trustees and anybody else that would like to come who has something they’d like to discuss.

What is Flapjack and Feedback?

Flapjack and Feedback, runs every couple of months in the Bistro. People can drop in to give us feedback – what they think goes well and what they think we could improve.

The Charity’s strapline is ‘making every moment count’ and that’s what we’re about: the moments and little things can make a big difference to patients and families. We really could do with some more points of view about the Charity, from patients and visitors – what we’ve done well and how the service can be improved in any way and we only can find that out if people tell us. We can learn a lot from constructive criticism.

We want to know the good and the bad because everybody says, “Oh, it’s just marvellous!”, which is great, but I’m sure there’s little areas we could change that would make a world of difference to some patients or their relatives.

Do you have any examples of small changes that have made a difference?

Yes, the external signage to the Hospice. That was a big issue at one point. One of the ladies in the Inpatient Unit brought it up. There was an overhaul of all the signage which did improve things for them, which was good.

There was another example of a patient on the Inpatient Unit, who couldn’t see anymore. They used to love reading the newspaper and then once the patient’s family told the nurse that, we got a volunteer who every day sat and read the paper to them. Which is fantastic!

The people who know the most are the patients or the people who’ve been sitting by their bedside. Not everything suits everybody and there’s things that we can change to make it better for individuals.

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Your feedback is invaluable in order to help us keep improving our services. You can feedback about any of our services in Cambridge, at the Alan Hudson Centre in Wisbech or in the Community on our website, email care@arhc.org.uk or call 01223 675777.