About Iain Rennie Hospice At Home
The Iain Rennie Hospice at Home is a registered charity which offers specialist nursing care, support and advice for patients with cancer and other life threatening illnesses in their homes. The Hospice at Home also aims to help the relatives and those carers close to the patient during the illness and bereavement period.
The service is available 365 days a year and offers patients and carers access to specialist advice and nursing visits 24 hours a day.
The professional care offered by the teams of specialist and support nurses enables those people who choose to stay at home achieve the best quality of life.
The charity has four teams working throughout the Chilterns area of Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire providing care to adult patients and one team (the Pepper Team) which looks after children.
Iain Rennie nurses work alongside and complement General Practitioners and district nurses and also work collaboratively with in-patient hospices and other palliative care providers in our area.
Patients are normally referred to the service by their GP or district nurse, but anyone can contact the service directly. On referral, one of the team members will visit the patient at home to assess his or her needs. Following this, a plan of care is developed jointly with the primary health care team and the patient and family.
The charity offers a range of ongoing bereavement support which is organised by our family support co-ordinator.
The Hospice at Home service is offered to patients and families free of charge, although the charity receives just a small percentage of its income from the NHS. As it cares for people in their own homes, it is able to spend a very high proportion of income directly on nursing care.
The charity relies very heavily on fundraising and donations for most of its income. Fundraising groups and shops, local companies, grant making trusts and the many organisations who support it with donations and fundraising events all help it to raise the funds the charity needs.
Our history
In 1985 five hospice trained nurses came together to provide the nursing care needed to enable a young man, Iain Rennie, to be cared for at home in accordance with his and his family's wishes. Thus Iain Rennie was the first patient of the service that now bears his name.
The nurses also offered the care required to embrace and support his wife, Moira, and young children. His company agreed to provide some funding to pay them a basic wage and the nurses had the full support of Iain's GP and District Nurse. The five nurses, along with their families and friends, formed a formal committee and registered with the UK Charities Commission in 1987 as "The Iain Rennie Hospice at Home".
Moira Rennie remains a strong supporter of the organisation and is our president.
In the first few years the service grew slowly, spreading the Hospice At Home message across the Chilterns area of Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire.
In 1990 the group launched a major fundraising appeal to raise an additional £100,000 which it achieved within twelve months. This appeal not only raised income to support the growth of the service but also increased public awareness significantly.
Since then the service has grown from one team of five nurses to its current position where there are four teams caring for adults as well as a paediatric team caring for terminally ill children.