About St Christopher's Hospice
St Christopher’s Hospice cares for people with cancer and other serious illnesses, helping them and their families to cope at this most difficult time.
The Hospice cares for around 1,600 patients, and their families, each year from the South-East London community in which it works. Most of its patients have cancer, some have motor neurone disease, severe heart failure or chest disease.
The Hospice treats its patients as individuals and strives to understand and meet their unique needs, in the hospice or, increasingly, in the familiar surroundings of their own homes.
Through bereavement counselling and advice it helps families, including children, to learn to face the future again.
St Christopher’s is widely acknowledged as the pioneer of the modern hospice movement and has earned a reputation for excellence in clinical practice, research and education. Since it was founded in 1967, its influence has reached around the globe.
St Christopher’s is not a wealthy organisation. It needs around £9m a year to maintain its present levels of services.
Just 40 per cent of its income comes form the National Health Service. The balance must be raised from grants, legacies, the generosity of our supporters and our charity shops.
The hospice’s services include:
- Home care and inpatient care
- Out-patient care
- The day Centre offering social and creative opportunities
- Bereavement counselling and support for friends and families
- Social, spiritual and psychological support
- Physiotherapy
- A library and bookshop
- A wide ranging programme of education and research
All are provided free of charge to patients and families.
Our history
In founding St Christopher's in 1967, Dame Cicely Saunders made an extraordinary contribution to alleviating human suffering. The hospice has been a centre of innovation and insight ever since.
So what were things like before St Christopher’s?
By the 1950s, social trends were changing and most people died in hospitals rather than in their own homes. This change reflected the growing number of treatments available in hospitals. The medical profession increasingly saw death as failure.
Cancer was the most feared diagnosis. Physical pain afflicted at least three quarters of cancer sufferers and appropriate painkillers were rarely used. Morphine was considered addictive and too dangerous.
Led by Dame Cicely, St Christopher’s set out to discover practical solutions and to disseminate them widely.
There were, of course, other hospices before St Christopher’s. These hospices were oases of dedicated nursing care for the terminally ill, but they were not what we now think of as modern palliative care. In contrast, St Christopher’s was committed to education and research, as well as excellence in clinical care.
This combination of science, care and sharing of experiences identified the opening of St Christopher’s Hospice with the start of the modern hospice movement.
A holistic approach, caring for a patient’s physical, spiritual and psychological wellbeing, marked a new beginning, not only for the care of the dying but for the practice of medicine as a whole.