Budleigh Salterton Lions Club recently made a generous donation of £750 to Budleigh Salterton & District Hospiscare.

This was raised via a number of quiz nights and the charity was delighted to receive such a generous amount.

Lucy Goddard, Fundraising and Support Manager, said: "Budleigh Salterton & District Hospiscare is an independent local community charity covering Budleigh Salterton, Woodbury and the surrounding villages, which pays for Hospiscare’s services for patients with progressive, life-limiting illness.

"We provide specialist palliative care and hands-on nursing care in the patient’s own home 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
"As you can imagine, this last year has hit us as a small charity very hard, so any donations are always very gratefully received. As you may know,
we are a separate but sister charity to the much larger Hospiscare Exeter and
Mid Devon."

Budleigh Salterton & District Hospiscare was originally founded in 1983 under the name of Care of the Terminally Ill (COTI) to provide a service, through trained volunteers, to patients facing terminal illness in their own homes and their families. By April 1986 there were 30 trained volunteers and a MacMillan trained nurse was being employed. Initial grants from the National Society for Cancer Relief helped to pay her salary but a hugely energetic fundraising effort was made to reach the initial target total of £100,000.

The first AGM was held on 27 November 1985 when the group's name was changed to Budleigh Salterton & District Hospiscare. The provision of the nursing service by Hospiscare Exeter, Mid & East Devon started on 1 September 1986.

In June 2015, the Charity Commission granted the initiative CIO (Charitable Incorporated Organisation) status, a new form of charity introduced to provide various benefits over previous forms.

The Hospiscare@Home service, extending the existing Clinical Nurse Specialist (CNS) service to hands-on nursing care in the patient's own home, launched at the end of June 2017.

The charity says: "Our administration is carried out from an office in the Budleigh Salterton Medical Centre; the nurses are based at Highview Gardens, Exmouth.

"We need to raise in excess of £400,000 per annum to continue to support the vital services we provide to the local community. We do not receive any financial support from the NHS or the Government."