Celebrating Children’s Hospice Week – Emma, Director of Care

This has been a rollercoaster year for Acorns, but throughout the challenges, the children and their families have been our central focus. In March we, like the rest of the world, were tested with the onslaught of Covid 19 and the huge preparations to change and adapt our services to support not only our children and families but also the wider NHS.

We offered our Birmingham hospice to the NHS for additional bed capacity as the pandemic loomed. The care team from the Birmingham hospice rose to the rallying call for all health and social care workers across the nation to be flexible and relocated to the Acorns Walsall and Worcester Hospices. 

Families were asked to shield, stay at home and protect themselves and their vulnerable children from the deadly virus. Parents were having to not only care for their child without their usual support networks and services but also home school their other children, organise food deliveries and medication supplies whilst also managing in many cases their own anxiety, stress and feelings of isolation.

From the beginning of lockdown, Acorns care teams have been offering considerable support to families. Whilst Acorns Family Team Workers themselves had to work from home, they have contacted and maintained regular contact with more than 600 current families and more than 150 bereaved families by phone, virtual support and where essential we have also undertaken home visits (mainly for our bereaved families).

The Volunteers Managers became logistic experts in coordinating food donations from the wonderful public and supporting organisations, mobilising volunteers and staff to ensure we could deliver food parcels to those families most in need. In one week alone we delivered to over 120 families. Each family received an average of four shopping bags per delivery; over the 10 week period, this has resulted in thousands of bags of supplies being delivered.

We have also delivered activity packs for siblings, provided access to virtual groups for siblings and one to one virtual support. Whilst we have not been able to use the hospice for Stay and Play, the nurses and physios who lead these groups thought of other creative ways of providing this support; using the wonders of Zoom, they have provided Stay and Play groups virtually, bringing together groups of children, parents and siblings in music-based sessions. Remaining on the virtual theme, the teams have provided links to Acorns YouTube site for families so they can access our nurses and activity workers reading stories and or demonstrating activities they can do at home.

Our Walsall and Worcester hospices have provided care for children who needed to be discharged from hospital and were unable to be at home. Our nurses worked alongside NHS colleagues on the wards with the children prior to their discharge to Acorns so the children could get to know the nurses. This also helped as our nurses knew what was needed to ensure we were able to meet their complex care needs.

Acorns Nurses have and continue to work alongside our Children’s Community Nurses working a number of days a week supporting the caseloads of community colleagues. In addition, one nurse has been based at the Birmingham Women’s and Children’s Hospital working in their specialist palliative care team.

Acorns nurses and care teams have donned PPE and ensured our hospices have continued to be a haven for those children who have needed End of Life support. We have been able to support the whole family to stay whilst their child received the very best of care at the very worst time.

From June our hospice teams are also providing emergency stays for those families who are in crisis and or physically and emotionally exhausted.

Now the Acorns Birmingham hospice is not needed by the NHS we are temporarily using the hospice to provide bookable therapeutic based services for children, the specialist physiotherapists are providing hydrotherapy and physiotherapy and we are also coordinating music therapy.