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This has been an exciting year for our volunteers here at the Phyllis Tuckwell Hospice. Various projects have been set up both to enhance the volunteering opportunities within the Hospice and to help the volunteers who work here to know how much they are appreciated. In June, we heard that our volunteers had been given the Queen’s Golden Jubilee Award for Volunteering, one of only 200 organisations nationwide to receive this honour. This award is now displayed in the cabinet just inside Reception. The introduction of a quarterly newsletter aimed specifically at the volunteers has proved very popular, giving us an opportunity to send information to our volunteers as well as to those companies who have helped us by providing teams of volunteers for various projects in and around the Hospice. In February, our volunteers were invited to a Day Out to Eastbourne with volunteers from CHASE in Guildford by the South East England Tourist Guide Association. Everyone had a wonderful time and, although it was February, the weather was good enough to sit on the beach and enjoy the sea view whilst eating lunch! During March, Jenny came forward to volunteer. Jenny had been an art teacher previously and has set up a new art project in our Day Care centre. Another volunteer, Agneta, has set up a gardening project in Day Care, to help our patients grow vegetables and flowers in pots, which can be wheeled in and out of the building as necessary for our inpatients who miss their gardening. In June we celebrated National Volunteers Week by holding a ‘Celebration of Volunteering’ at High Cross Church in Camberley. This was a chance to thank our 450 volunteers with an evening of wine, song and long service awards. At the Hospice, we launched our ‘Treats Trolley’ offering sweets and toiletries to patients and their relatives, facilitated by a grant from ‘Help the Hospices’. Our Ward Clerks cheerfully trundle round the wards and Day Care every morning. It seems to be quite a hit with the staff too! Our volunteers are very special and we are very proud of their commitment – they bring a breath of fresh air into the Hospice environment by carrying out a variety of roles, some with direct patient contact and others, just as importantly, ‘behind the scenes’. We have a very friendly, relaxed working atmosphere with no two days the same and, at the end of the day, we hope that all our volunteers take away a sense of achievement and pride in a job well done.
Gill Gibson “Every visitor of ours, and of others to whom I have spoken has said how, in just a few steps and minutes inside the Hospice, they’ve known that this is a special place. It’s a palpable feeling. A place only made special by you all of course. How amazing! How do you find folk like you? Perhaps you help to make them. What a fantastic team you are – an inspiration – and that is just one of the things we take away with us.”
Becoming a Volunteer
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