Our Vision and Mission

“We know better so we do better”

Our Vision

To be the leading provider by choice in the provision of palliative care services, in our field, because the only time we have is now

It is clearly essential that we offer the services that the community needs.  We want to ensure that patients and their carers choose to come here and that health care professionals who refer do so because we have been able to evidence the highest quality of care.

Our Mission

To champion the needs of those living with a life threatening illness by:

Widening access to palliative care services based on need not diagnosis

Lewis-Manning Hospice is looking at creative ways of offering specialist and supportive care to all patients who need palliative care.

Ensuring equality of access to services for all who need them

This is about widening care but also about effectively educating the community as to what palliative care is and what can be achieved within day hospice.

Treating every day and every person as special

We have always valued every patient as unique and we try to ensure that the old hospice adage “putting life into days, not necessarily days into life” is part of all that we do.  All services offered at Lewis-Manning Hospice are person-centred and patient led.

Ensuring relevant information is available and accessible to everyone with a life threatening illness and their carers

Part of our role is to make sure that patients and carers have the right information at the right time, to signpost them to other healthcare professionals and to support them in this process.  We are linked to the web in day hospice and are able to advise on appropriate sites that give responsible and accurate information.

Providing high quality clinical and social support utilising the best of evidence based practice

Lewis-Manning is uniquely able to use the education of its team to ensure the highest quality of clinical support based on up to date research. 

Raising awareness of what living with a life threatening illness means

This is a role we take seriously both for the community, as we believe that hospice should be the educator on death and dying, but also as far as the patients and their carers are concerned.

De-mystifying the last taboo by accepting death as part of life

As we all know, sometimes to our cost, it feels like there are no taboos.  With reality television a constant in our lives we our intimately aware of most human functions.  However, there is one important taboo left, that of death and dying.  How ironic that the very thing that we are all going to experience is only spoken of reluctantly, if at all.  Until recently the dying were normally moved away from their home to die, and we still struggle to talk to the bereaved, and to those who have just been diagnosed with a life threatening illness.  Hospices should be the organisations that sensitively raise this last taboo and help both patients and carers but also society come to terms with the fact that “the only time we have is now”.

Providing a range of services which enable individuals to live their lives to the full and maximise the time they have

So if the only guaranteed time any of us have is now, the hospice sees its role to help ensure that people are able to experience that time to its fullest.  As far as possible that time should be as free from pain (and other symptoms) as possible.  At Lewis-Manning Hospice the skills mix allows us to offer amongst other services specialist palliative care, supportive care, symptom and pain management, rehabilitation (or adaptation), aromatherapy, and creative arts.

Developing in partnership with others high quality innovative services in response to individual needs and aspirations

Hopefully we have made it very clear that Lewis-Manning Hospice is patient led.  This means that we tailor our care to each patient’s needs and requirements.  However we do not do this in isolation.  Lewis-Manning Hospice is part of the specialist palliative care team led by Dr Stephen Kirkham based at Forest Holme.  The hospice attends multi disciplinary team meetings led by Dr Kirkham and works alongside the community teams to ensure the best possible care for patients with palliative care needs.