Revolution for St Luke's Hospice

For many years Rotary Wickford has supported St Luke’s Hospice in Basildon. Indeed £50,000 was raised through various events in 1995 and 1996 to go towards the cost of building the In Patient’s Unit at the hospice, and since then there have been many events held to raise funds to support the hospice over the intervening years.

It’s often assumed that St Luke’s services are only about supporting people in the latter stages of their lives, but they also offer many services to make life easier for people with chronic illnesses. 

One such is the Lymphedema Support Team who help people suffering from this illness, often brought about as a side effect of treatments for cancer. However, before the team can treat a patient they have to undertake an ABI test to assure that they are fit enough to receive the treatment, usually using Doppler Ultrasound. However, this is a long and complicated process and with limited resources means that many patients wait for up to a year to get the test.

We’re pleased to announce that Rotary Wickford have recently donated the funds to pay for a MESI diagnostics machine which eliminates the need for a Doppler test and can be done straightaway by the support team, enabling them to get on with providing the support and treatments to ease the symptoms of lymphedema without that wait for a year.

Recently a number of members of the Rotary Club visited the Hospice to see the machine in action (even providing a guinea pig for the demonstration!) and were very excited to see how this will revolutionise the service the Hospice can provide. And when Rotarian Nick volunteered to be a guinea pig, we were all relieved when he came out fine!

Paula Prendergast, Head of Integrated Therapy Services says “As a result of the support of the Rotary Club we have been able to speed up the delivery of treatments to these patients to ease their symptoms and make life a little less arduous. With a patient list of 1300 people in the area the impact on the service we can provide is phenomenal. Thank you Wickford!”