Andy Gray, Hospiscare Ambassador, during his speech at Sandford. Video by Alan Quick
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00:00 Good morning everybody and I'd like to also say thank you to Victoria and family for organising
00:06 this and to all of you for coming along. I wrote the book in Hospice Care just before
00:11 Covid, they asked me if I could help raise a million, well £1.2 million from this area
00:18 to launch Hospice Care at home and I enlisted the help of a few friends, Adrian Miller who's
00:23 here amongst others, and just sort of came up with lots of really clever ideas as to
00:28 how to do things like this. Covid hit and we couldn't do things like this so we actually
00:33 did raise a million pounds from private donations from very clever people who had a really good
00:38 look at how effective Hospice Care was before handing over very very large amounts of money
00:44 to help start Hospice Care at home which is another part of what the Hospice Care offer is.
00:49 So it just shows that we've looked at how well run this organisation is and what an amazing
00:56 thing it does and how astonishing that delivery is to supporting people in their end of life care
01:02 that these people were willing to do that and we managed to launch that.
01:05 I'm a pretty hard-nosed, pretty miserable sort of bloke but every time I meet these
01:10 Hospice Care nurses it actually raises a tear because of the extraordinary dedication and
01:16 the effect that they have on people during their last days of life but also much just as
01:22 importantly the ability of the family to grieve properly because they know that the best thing
01:29 has been done at that time in other people's lives and the ability to move on because of that
01:35 amazing work that these very very dedicated nurses and practitioners provide to our community.
01:42 Not the one disaster I always think with Hospice Care is the fact that their branding, the name
01:48 Hospice Care, makes it sound like it's a national organisation. It isn't. This organisation basically
01:53 provides end of life care for Exeter and Central Devon. We are in the centre of that Central Devon
01:59 bit. Their reach out into Clarebyshire and Learcompton which are the sort of main two
02:06 towns in that area isn't actually that great so what Victoria is doing here is wonderful
02:11 because it actually highlights the fact we're here. We had a very good Siren, Pasdeen and
02:16 Kang Band event last year which also raised lots of money and was also very successful but
02:22 one hopes that events like this are like dropping a pebble into a pond and the ripples go out from
02:27 it and people have a greater understanding of the fact that you know we have to care for Hospice
02:32 Care so that they can care for us. It has a very small government grant compared to other Hospice
02:38 Cares and because of that at the moment after having been incredibly well run for a very long
02:44 time and still incredibly well run they are struggling a bit because of the inflationary
02:49 cost of employing nurses and people like that because the National Health Service has sort of
02:53 increased nurses salaries by quite a lot so just at this moment in time we do need to get behind
03:00 Hospice Care more than we have done for a very long time. So I just want to put those few words
03:05 in and thank you very much and again thank you to Victoria. Thank you.