“It was really, really hard work to get the hospice off the ground in the first place, but it was so needed because there was such a lack of provision. We had brilliant camaraderie between the nurses, and you just met the most amazing families and patients.” – Maureen Bryant
Maureen, now a Supporting Hands volunteer and previously a Compassionate Neighbour, was one of the five original nurses who worked together to get Iain Rennie Hospice at Home off the ground, helping to fulfil Moira and Iain Rennie’s wish that Iain should be cared for at home. She worked for 20 years as a Clinical Nurse Specialist with Iain Rennie Hospice at Home.
Maureen says: “Back in 1984 I worked at St Francis Hospice as a bank nurse, having completed palliative care training. We knew that Iain wanted to be cared for at home, not in hospital, and so, because of an initial absence of funding, we provided this care as a group, on a voluntary basis. We received money from Shell to care for our second patient onwards, and from there it never stopped, and we never went back to being bank nurses – that’s when Iain Rennie Hospice at Home was formed.
“It was really, really hard work to get the hospice off the ground in the first place, but it was so needed because there was such a lack of provision. We had brilliant camaraderie between the nurses, and you just met the most amazing families and patients.”
“Patients and families told us we made a big difference and the families were always willing to help us afterwards. Some bereaved people eventually became volunteers. We went to families from all sorts of backgrounds across a very wide area.
“I think it’s fair to say we were the first hospice at home service in the country that was offering 24 hour hands on care, 7 days a week. It was amazing how it happened. Sometimes we got to having no money at all but, Mary Robson, one of the other five nurses had strong religious faith and said if we were running out of money, money will come, and it always did”
Reflecting on the history of the organisation, Maureen recalls what she is most proud of:
“We had a tremendous problem with sorting out of hours medicines originally so I worked with local pharmacists and surgeries to set up the ‘Just in case medicine scheme’ which meant GPs could prescribe ‘just in case’ drugs for patients in distress over weekends and nights, when it was ordinarily difficult to get drugs prescribed from the pharmacy. The impact was huge – it meant patients didn’t have to wait or suffer in pain.”
Maureen spent the last six and a half years of her working life as a Macmillan specialist palliative care nurse, working at Hemel Hempstead and Watford General hospitals, before joining us as a volunteer.