“You don't come here just to die”

Martyn Reeves is the Chief Executive of Wisdom Hospice Charity, a member of the Medway Voluntary Sector Leaders Network and a former car salesman. Steven met him in his office at Wisdom Hospice to find out about the work they do, opening the Hanger, and whether he checks whether a patient receiving end-of-life care has made a will...

What is the Wisdom Hospice Charity?
It all really started with one of the teams at the Medway Hospital, a nurse and a doctor. Peter Jennings was a really good doctor, surgeon, very fed up with saying "That's all I can do for you." He mentioned this to one of his nurses, and she said, “You need to go along to St. Christopher's Hospice in Sydenham in London.” That was the first hospice that opened in 1967. This was late 70s, early 80s. He went along on a Friday to meet the palliative care nurse trainers, and he was blown away by what the hospice did. He comes back to Medway, thinking, “Medway needs a hospice.” The nurse then said, “You need to meet one of our patients, Molly Wisdom. Meet her and just see what she has to say,” because he needs to raise money to build a hospice.
He went to meet Molly, and Molly famously said to him, or infamously said to him, “You keep me alive, I’ll run you two coffee mornings, and I'll raise the money to start off your fund.” She did this, and in the two coffee mornings, she raised £2,000. That was the start of the charity. That was the start of raising money. She raised the money, then rang Peter and said, “Well, where do we put the money now?” He said, “Put it in a bank.” “What do I call the bank account?” Which they called The Wisdom account, and that's where the Wisdom name came from. It's from Molly Wisdom, who was a sweet shop owner in Medway. 
I've found documents from groups like the Borstal Ladies that came together and raised £55k over three years. There was the church up the road, St Luke's Church. I did a talk there last year, and they were all in their 80s, these ladies, this church group. I'm talking about the hospice, and it's about an hour talk, and they asked the questions, and they said, “Molly Wisdom came to speak to us and asked us to do a jumble sale to raise money,” and it made me feel so good. That's Molly Wisdom, that is how Medway do things. There's a need there. This humble lady said I'll start it all off and 42 years later, here is this fantastic hospice that's built on a bit of land the NHS gave us originally. It's been operated by the health authority ever since, currently by Community Healthcare.
The charity is here to support the hospice as and when we have some money, we pay a grant to them every month.

What is your official occupation? 
I'm Chief Executive of Wisdom Hospice Charity. 

Do you have any additional roles, paid or unpaid? 
I sit on the Medway Voluntary Sector Leaders Network. I'm very involved with the Transformation Academy in Medway and the Medway Voluntary Alliance as well. Then I sit with all the hospices in a group in the south east under the umbrella of Hospice UK, and there's a Kent Hospice Alliance. We meet together with hospice CEOs. There's lots of collaboration and learning that goes on in our sector. 

What is the Wisdom Hospice? What do they do here?
The hospice looks after people at end of life and offers end of life care. Either through the hospice here with its 15 beds or in the community, because ultimately, people would like to remain in their home as long as possible. We cover an area from ME1 to ME12, Medway and Swale. That's just above us here towards Gravesend, and then down towards just past Teynham and out towards the island at Sheppey, encompassed by the M2, population roughly 420,000 people.

At the risk of starting off in a morbid kind of place, what does that end of life mean? Who makes that determination? 
That's a good question. How do you get referred here is the question you're asking. You get referred here by any healthcare professional. It's not just cancer.

It's not just the patient that the hospice looks after

What is end of life? 
Now, there are different definitions of that, but generally speaking, it's someone in the last 12 months of their life. And that's so hard to predict. This all started with the Symptom Control Team from Medway Hospital. It's not just about the last weeks, days of life, but actually controlling the symptoms towards the end of life to make that journey as comfortable as possible for that patient and their family. It's not just the patient that the hospice looks after. It’s a holistic approach, looking after all of the family through psychosocial as well as healthcare. 

You've only got 15 beds. If life finds a way, and someone holds on, is there a waiting list?
Yeah, there can be, but actually, what the community teams do is manage that extremely well. The community nurses look after the patients so well, they support them at home and also the hospital team. There's a hospital team from the hospice in Medway Hospital. They're supporting patients there as well. By careful choreography, hopefully we can maintain a level of care where we can. It's always difficult with an ageing population and the increase in need, but the hospice team are just wonderful people. They do a really good job looking after their patients. 

Does it occur when somebody is still terminal, but doing better, where they can go home from here?
Yeah, absolutely. Symptom control, you're in a pretty poor way. You get into the hospice and control symptoms, and people do go home. There's a great article in one of our newsletters from a patient who actually talks about coming to the hospice. They maintain, they control her symptoms, and she goes home, or they might go on to a care home. You don't come here just to die. There is the option towards the end of your journey, obviously, but that's down to the hospice team to work that out.

Is there support in place for the team that works here? Being surrounded by death the whole time...
Yeah, they have regular reflections. The team are really supportive of each other. They are quite incredible.

What is the relationship between the Wisdom Hospice and the Wisdom Hospice Charity?
There are 200 odd hospices in this country. The vast majority are independent charities. The charity runs the hospice and gets a grant from the government, around about 30%. We're an NHS hospice. This was the agreement made years ago that the charity built the hospice and gave it to the local health authority under the proviso you must provide end of life care in the hospice and the health authority at that time said “Can you still carry on raising money for the extras that we're going to need?” and that's what we're here for. We maintain a grant of about £60,000 a month at the moment, which goes towards the running costs, but equally, sometimes when there's extra facilities or equipment that are needed that are outside the NHS budget, then we can fund it. For instance, we’re relaunching a therapy centre in March, and we're funding that for the first two years, and then it becomes part of the grant from the government after that. That's the flexibility we can bring and the innovative approach we can bring to hospice care.

Who are the Friends of Wisdom Hospice?
Us. When I got here 15 years ago, we were called the Friends of the Wisdom Hospice. That was a charity that Molly set up. We were launched in 1982. I did feel that in the modern world, as we got to raise more money, as we continue, the Wisdom Hospice Charity was a better way of reflecting how our charity, which is a business, is growing. It gives a bit wider appeal, I feel. I feel that connotations of the word friends is a little bit old fashioned, whereas we're a bit more of a growing charity and need to raise more money.

Who runs the Wisdom Hospice shops?
We run those. That's the separate trading company we have. We currently have five shops or six shops, including e-commerce.

What is The Hangar?
The Hangar was a bit of a dream. About four years ago, we wanted a destination shop that's different. I wanted to be on a retail estate, industrial unit that's bigger, to give customers a completely different experience. That's a dream for me. I didn't know how to make it work. We've got an amazing team supporting how that works. One of the biggest things for me is that we only sell donated goods, and we actually avoid some pre-loved clothing, for instance, going into landfill. We probably stop about 250,000 items a year going into landfill through the shops. 

Outside of the shops and The Hangar, how does the charity raise money to sustain that grant for the hospice? 
If you take retail as one separate income stream, we have four other income streams. You can make a regular donation to the hospice, to us, the charity. Events, you can come to one of our events, like Walk the Night in Chatham in June, or you might want to do your own event, like the London Marathon, and then you raise money for us. Or you might want to do a quiz and raise money for us. We run our own lottery as well. There are also legacies if you want to leave a gift in your will to us, which happens fairly frequently. 

Just to clarify, what was the Walk the Night? 
We did it the first time last year, working with Chatham Maritime Trust. They gave us the area on St Mary's Island. We did a 10k walk to watch the sun go down and then walk the night. We raised just over £30,000 from that, with nearly 500 people coming to it. We organised this fun walk and lots of different people came along who've had experiences from the hospice or from the Medway area just to enjoy themselves. 

At the risk of sounding slightly like an Agatha Christie novel, how do you avoid, because I'm appreciating that people come to you when they're end of life, a number of those people must, because of the level of care that is provided for them, leave a gift within their will for the hospice. How do you avoid accusations that the person has been taken advantage of?
Ethically, in the way we're set up. I don't have any say in how the hospice is run, because that's run by a fantastic team operated by Medway Community Healthcare. We sit separate from the hospice, and then people need to communicate with us and ask. There's no ambulance chasing. That's the ethical thing.

No one from the charity goes and sits with people in the hospice and asks if they have made a will?
Absolutely not.

How did you come to work with the charity? 
Good question. I left school and joined my father's business. I was a car dealer for a long time, and I'd had to change the car business through the recessions, and I was working from home with an internet business, and then a really good friend of mine ended up with cancer. I was taking him to his appointments and got frustrated with the system and rang the hospice to say, “Can you help?” and they did. They were amazing, and it just transformed the end of his life. The journey was much more comfortable for him and also his family, especially his wife. His wife could go back to being his wife and not his carer.
These aren't my own words, it was a volunteer here that told me this, and she said, and I agree with her, that the hospice wrapped a blanket of love around the family, all of us, and that was impressive. I then started raising money for that hospice, running a car business from home. I saw the advert for a Chief Executive and came here for my first ever interview, first ever CV I'd written, always been self-employed and frankly walked through the door and just got it. Fell in love with the place, and I never looked back.