Mission and Values
Our Mission
Our mission describes what we do. It underpins all actions that we take across the organisation, and it is at the core of everything we do. It can be considered in three parts:
Hospice in the Weald strives to provide care, advice, and support for everyone in our community living with terminal or life-limiting illness
When we say we “strive”, this reflects the reality that we cannot yet directly provide hospice are to all the people – adults and children – in our area we would like to reach. It is widely recognised that within a given population, slightly less than 1% will die within the next year, of which approximately 76% would benefit from palliative care. With circa 360,000 people living in our notional catchment area, the number in the last year of their life who could potentially benefit from our care is around 2,500 people every year.
Together with their loved ones
Providing advice, support and hope for patients is central to what we do, and we will always provide the same for the loved ones of patients too. A death will not just affect the person that is dying but also those around them.
We empower people to celebrate life and make the most of precious time they have for living
For all of us our time is limited and precious; death is a certainty. For our patients and their loved ones this is brought into sharp relief. Adjusting to a terminal diagnosis is hard and, in their distress, sometimes people retreat into themselves and may stop living. We work with patients and their loved ones to overcome this in all aspects and help to ensure that both adults and children have opportunity to make the most of the precious time they have for living.
Our Values
Our organisational values are effectively a code of conduct which, together with our culture of empowerment, guide our decision making and our behaviours, making it clear how people working and volunteering at Hospice in the Weald should behave.
- Honest – we are a trustworthy and reliable organisation that treats people with respect and candour.
- Kind – kindness is central to the compassionate care we provide and is evident in all of our daily interactions.
- Learning – we strive to learn continually in all aspects of our work and embrace the changes needed to become
even better. - Ambitious – we will never stop working to provide people with access to the care they want and need.
- Sustainable – meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability to meet future needs. There
are three aspects to our approach to sustainability – environmental, social, and economic. - Effective – enabling adults and children in Kent and Sussex to access the most effective hospice care, celebrate
life and have a dignified death.
John & Beverley’s Story
Beverley was caring for John at home, and living in a one-bedroom bungalow, it was getting quite tight. If John needed any assistance at home, they’d have to call for nurses to come and help Beverley to care for John.
At Cottage Hospice, knowing that they had the instant support from the nurses made caring so much easier for Beverley and meant that they could have visitors who wouldn’t have been able to visit when at home. Cottage Hospice brought John out of a rut and in his words, it “changed my life, to a degree”.
