The founder of a Pembrokeshire hospice has expressed her disappointment that two of its beds are now out of action after the closure of a local surgery.
Shalom House in St Davids opened its doors to patients in 2007 after ten years of fund raising.
The five-bedroom bungalow on Nun Street was gifted to the charity by romantic novelist Elizabeth de Guise so that the palliative care unit could be established.
(Image: Shalom House) Unfortunately, Ms De Guise died in 2005, two years before Baroness Ilora Finlay of Llandaff, the charity’s patron, opened the doors to the palliative care centre.
Shalom House was set up to provide palliative support to patients and their relatives.
Due to financial constraints the hospice now focuses on day-care in order to ‘support as many patients as possible in a flexible and beneficial way’.
Since St Davids Surgery closed at the end of October, two rooms in Shalom House are being used to run a branch surgery, staffed by practice nurses, which Hywel Dda Health Board says has had a good take up.
However, Shalom House’s founder, Margaret Burnett MBE, said that she was ‘deeply saddened that Shalom is no longer a palliative care unit’.
(Image: Western Telegraph) She added that the centre now only had three beds open to patients for palliative respite care instead of five, due to the St Davids Branch Surgery now being located there.
“Unfortunately, when main funding is cut it becomes very difficult,” said Mrs Burnett. “But I feel Shalom is letting people down. They were promised a hospice for respite. But, with the agreement of the trustees and the management, the health board has taken over the place.”
Mrs Burnett added that Shalom House had been set up to help people from all over Pembrokeshire, but now nearly half of it was being used just for St Davids patients.
“People from all over Pembrokeshire fundraised for Shalom House. It’s not a St Davids charity,” she said. “It’s providing this clinic for people in St Davids. Elizabeth would never have allowed that. She would be so upset that they are doing that to her house.
“She didn’t give it to the health board, she gave it to the people of Pembrokeshire. She wanted everybody to access it, not just for St Davids.
“It was supposed to be for people from all over Pembrokeshire.”
Shalom House’s board of trustees said that the charity was ‘totally committed to delivering palliative care for residents from all over Pembrokeshire’ and that day centre care was currently available for three patients, five days a week.
The charity hopes that it would again be able to provide care for five patients next year and said that it also offered five-day, 24/7 respite stays when additional funding allows.
“Like many charities, our small palliative care centre, the only hospice in Pembrokeshire, has suffered significant funding cuts over the last few years and we are at serious risk of closure,” said the trustees.
“We are all working incredibly hard to keep Shalom House open, so that we can continue to offer excellent, much-needed care to people from all over Pembrokeshire with life limiting conditions.”
They added that allowing the branch surgery to operate from two of its rooms had allowed local residents to access a practice nurse and provided the charity with some much-needed funding, enabling it to stay open for longer.
“Since starting the Save Shalom campaign earlier this year, we have had amazing support from the people of Pembrokeshire, resulting in donations increasing by 75 per cent over the past eight months,” they said.
“We would ask everyone to please get behind us and join us in our continued fight to save this much-loved local charity. People can kindly donate at www.shalomstdavids.org.”