Beginning a vision for new hospice in Hamilton

Code Red Hospice Hamilton will be a Hospice without beds, it’s efforts will be targeted at helping people where they are. It’s resources will be directed at working in the community by training and resourcing volunteers to work with people diagnosed with life limiting illness where they are already living. Trained hospice palliative care (HPC) volunteers will meet people at their home, in hospital or care facility.

Focusing all of our attention and energies on putting resources into the community will serve MANY times the client base that another residential hospice could serve. We will directly enhance and support quality end-of-life care in the Code Red Neighbourhoods of Hamilton.

Two Pronged Help for Code Red

The power of this model is that it serves two great purposes for these neighbourhoods with heightened need:

1. 1.It brings hospice palliative care to people where they are in the community by training volunteers to go to them,
   

2. 2.It builds community through it’s very existence and operation as a community resource centre.
   

Code Red Hospice Hamilton will be a living example of community building in action by creating a Volunteer/Client Resource Centre. This centre will cater to volunteers as much as to HPC clients. A centre that will be used for training and for the provision of services to volunteers and clients. The Centre will become a hive of activity in its neighbourhood, it will put down deep roots to strengthen its community.

The resource centre will be a place where volunteers are trained and continuously refreshed. It will also a place where we offer alternative therapies equally to a constituency of clients and volunteers. This centre is how we will continue to motivate and grow our volunteer base by lowering attrition and keeping our volunteers motivated and healed.

The chronic shortage of Hospice residential beds will never accommodate more than a small fraction of the deaths that occur in Hamilton. The people of the Code Red neighbourhoods are essentially getting no HPC currently.

Hamilton needs a Community Hospice to build it’s coping capacity. This is both a social justice and a demographic issue and nowhere is the need greater than in the Code Red neighbourhoods.

If you are willing to help in any way to make Code Red Hospice Hamilton become reality, please contact me, John Wilbur, by clicking here or in the box below.