Vicki Guest, Senior University Hospice Lecturer/Practitioner and Angela Egerton, Hospice University Lecturer/Practitioner both joined Bolton Hospice just over 15 years ago as newly qualified nurses, and have worked together ever since their first day on 23rd October 2006.

“While we were both nurses on the ward, we were involved in the clinical learning environment which is where we looked after the student nurses that came to the hospice. We would be notified of the placements and the student nurses coming, and we would organise their placements for them, assign them to a mentor and just generally make sure they had a good experience while they were here, so we were both interested in education and development from then."

“The Education Team was started by another member of staff in around 2008/2009, so we had both been here two or three years. That was the first time there had been any education, prior to that if anybody within the hospice had an interest they would share that interest with others, then it became a formal education team." Vicki went on to join the Education team in 2014 followed by Angela in 2015.

Angela was redeployed at the hospice during the height of the pandemic, working with other services that needed support.

“When Covid-19 hit I was redeployed because we couldn’t do any education at all really, so I was redeployed to the other hospice services and I did work for 12 months with the hospice at home team and on the ward, then slowly was able to be released back to my own post within education and I am back there full time now. We do still help out on a lot, sometimes just covering if it is needed on the ward.”

Anglea along with other members of Bolton Hospice staff helped the Bolton COVID-19 vaccination efforts in March 2021, working with colleagues in healthcare across Bolton to support them in vaccinating members of the local community.

“A lot of things have changed at the hospice, the building's themselves have changed and are unrecognisable really to how they were when we first started at the hospice. The buildings are beautiful, they’ve been refurbished throughout and remodelled. As far as our roles, they have changed but the hospice ethos is still there and the fundamentals of what we do. We think that patient's needs have changed, people are living longer with cancer now so we're supporting them for longer and in different ways to how it used to be when we first started at the hospice.

When we first came, we still supported people like we do now, but it feels like we did a lot more end of life care. Whereas now patients can come to the hospice over quite a number of years. So the patient's needs have changed and what they need, so our services have adapted in response to that.”

“It definitely has grown massively over the last 15 years and for the better, the hospice is a place for the Bolton community and we've developed to reflect that. Even the fundraising team is bigger now and it’s needed for supporting all the services that the hospice has developed, and trying to fund as much of this as we can. The Wellbeing Hub has changed dramatically too, even over the last three years, in the hope that we'll start to see people earlier on in their diagnosis.”

“It's brilliant working together, we've known each other so long now and we can just be honest with each other, which is good for a working relationship. We just really do work well together."

“We’re only a small team, there’s three of us and we’ve just recently had Hannah start with us, who is the Clinical Educator, and that's working really, really well. Even though we are a small team, we’re not fazed by things that we're asked to do. We like to have challenges and no day is the same, like everyone probably will say in the hospice setting, because we are still working clinical at times but we're enjoying what we're doing and trying to get the hospice message out there to as many people. Education is not just internal for us, it very much is about taking the hospice ethos outside.

This education role has given us a lot of experiences, we’ve achieved a lot and even won an award. We’ve had many opportunities to go out there and get the message out, we've spoken at conferences about Bolton Hospice and what we do in education. We’ve had challenges where we've secured funding to set up a new service, which we've done, but then because of Covid-19 we couldn’t carry on but we are hoping for it to continue when possible. We've done a lot and it’s been really good doing it together."

"The main aim of everything that everybody does at the hospice is to support patients and their families, and over the last 15 years we’ve never forgotten that - even when we've come into this role of education, supporting teams and other nurses and other professionals in what they do, the main aim is to enhance patient care within Bolton.”

You can find out more about our Education Team and their work at the hospice and out in the community here