How local businesses in York are supporting St Leonard's Hospice: Emma Johnson

Here at St Leonard’s Hospice in York, our Business Club which includes more than 40 local organisations, continues to grow and support us. It’s not just about money from businesses.

Their teams volunteer for us at events, help us within the hospice by doing such things as gardening, catering and decorating. We’ve had pro bono work from legal teams to help review contracts or policies.

We can deliver education and training to staff within our partner organisations, providing talks on bereavement and advice on wellbeing support for people who are caring.

By supporting staff with these issues, the organisations are benefiting by getting staff back to work quickly – it’s mutually beneficial. We also offer Business Club networking events, a great opportunity to meet with like-minded businesses and get to know the Hospice. And because we get good support from the community and local businesses, we can provide more care.

Last year we asked the local population what would help them the most, in terms of local services.

What we are doing now is developing new services which offer direct support to people – like our Sunflower Wellbeing Hubs where we reach out to areas around the city. Our new Wellbeing Hub in Selby means people who need our support can drop in and talk to some of our team each week.

Our new Carer Support Service is hugely popular and another area of growth. People get to have a break of up to four or five hours to go out and do their shopping, or get their hair cut, or just generally have a rest. This is really important for people who are caring for someone with a life-limiting condition, helping them to cope.

The Covid pandemic taught us to that by working together, in partnership with others, we could achieve more. So, that’s what hospices in Yorkshire, and up and down the country, have been doing. We’ve joined forces to lobby government for more funding. We’ve been hit by inflation costs, like everyone. It’s great that the Government has recognised the need for pay awards for staff working in health/the NHS, but in order to recruit we need to match these salaries and we have only received a 1.8 per cent uplift on our grant from the NHS which nowhere near matches increased costs.

We’ve seen how the work of hospices is invaluable in terms of supporting wider health and social care – we demonstrated this during Covid and subsequently. Yet some hospices across the country face closure and 96 per cent of hospices faced a deficit at the beginning of this year. Others are having to close services. Fortunately, St Leonard’s is not one of these, but we’ve definitely got potentially tough decisions to make in the future.

Charity shops also tend to do well in periods of recession – people are also becoming more aware of recycling and their carbon footprint. Charity shops clearly go a long way to reducing waste – one of our supporters described it to me as ‘turning a chair into care’.

So, we’ve made the decision to increase the number of our shops, setting up a dedicated ‘Value Shop’ in Tang Hall and another larger, modern store in Pocklington. Shops are also great in terms of building new relationships in new areas and developing our relationships with local communities that we support with care.

We are fortunate in York to have fantastic support from our business community and for that we are grateful – indeed the unrivalled care we offer as a hospice is only possible due to the support of our community.

Emma Johnson is Chief Executive of St Leonard’s Hospice.