Wirral Hospice’s retail pricing policy

Wirral Hospice St John’s provides hospice care for adult patients. We also support carers and loved ones. Families are at the heart of everything we do.

Please visit our Wirral Hospice videos page to see some short films about our outpatients, wellbeing and inpatients services.

Our primary objective for our charity shops is always to raise as much funds as possible to provide specialist hospice care for our patients and support for their families.

These services are FREE for those we support. However it costs more than £7 million each year to provide these vital palliative and end-of-life care services across our whole Wirral community, and those costs are rising year on year.

Funding:

We are sadly seeing more and more hospices across the UK having to reduce patient care and family support services due to rising costs being unsustainable.

There is lots of work hospices are doing to see if they are able to secure more centralised government funding but at this time we have no indication if more can be found for our Cheshire & Merseyside hospices.

Wirral Hospice currently receives circa 40% annual funding from the NHS, the rest is made up of voluntary income; generated from our charity shops, our lottery, donations, local businesses, charitable trusts, people organising and undertaking fundraising events for us, and supporters leaving us Gifts in their Wills.

Wirral Hospice is in a strong and stable position – all thanks to the continued support of our local community who help us raise vital funds each year. Without whose ongoing support we would not be able to care for nearly as many families as we do.

Charity shops and online shopping:

Our charity shops and online shopping play a crucial role in raising funds – they contribute in the region of £600,000 net contribution* (profit) towards that care every year.

*Expenses: we have to pay rent for each of our shops and utilities bills, including waste disposal. In terms of staffing, we have a shop manager in each shop, and some of our bigger shops have a deputy manager too. We also have a van team to ensure that we are able to collect furniture at least five days a week.

Donated stock:

We are extremely grateful to receive lots of donations of furniture, clothing and bric-a-brac to our shops each year.

We have to check that all items are suitable for us to sell. Most of the items we receive are lovely, clean and sellable.

For those items we are able to sell, we carefully research brands of donated items to make sure our prices are reflective of the quality of those brands.

If things don’t sell at initial prices, we do reduce or move to another shop.

We also have an eBay shop to sell higher-end items and weird / wonderful treasures.

Unfortunately, sometimes, we receive donations that are not clean or good enough quality to sell, or we know that they are pieces of furniture that won’t sell easily through our shops (and we just don’t have the space to store furniture that won’t sell quickly). If that’s the case, we have to politely refuse those donations as it would cost us money to dispose of them otherwise.

Some stock donations we receive in bags and boxes are not suitable for us to sell but can be recycled through a textile recycling scheme. This does raise some extra money for us but the amount we receive per kilo has dramatically dropped in recent years due to the increase in costs for recycling suppliers to export clothing overseas. Therefore, the price we get is currently only 17p a kilo, whereas we used to get 45pm a kilo a few years ago.

Things we are unable to sell or unable to recycle have to be disposed of through our bins. We pay for waste disposal by weight. The amount we pay each year for waste disposal is astonishing and sadly this is due to an increase in unsuitable items being donated to our shops.

Brand NEW ex-catalogue stock:

We also invest in buying brand NEW ex-catalogue furniture and other goods to sell through our shops.

These items will be priced higher than donated items, this is because they’re brand new and it’s important that our investment costs are covered.

We also buy Christmas cards and small gift items from reputable wholesalers to sell via our shops.

The impact of your support towards our care:

Wirral Hospice produces a Quality Account, which is published annually and available to the public. This report shows the number of patients we care for across our services. The quality of our services is measured by looking at patient safety, the effectiveness of treatments that patients receive and patient feedback about the care provided.

We also publish a Trustees’ Report & Accounts (TARA) annually, which shows our financial position; how we generate income, and how we spend our money.

We are a registered charity with the Charity Commission and the Care Quality Commission – our documents are filed with both of these government organisations.

We are governed by a board of trustees (unpaid volunteers) and led by a chief executive and senior leadership team.

We are so fortunate to have such a wonderful team of staff and volunteers who help to make the most difficult times more bearable for our patients and their loved ones.

• We have 172 paid staff, many of whom are in part time roles. About 75% of our staff are directly involved in clinical care.
• We are supported by more than 400 volunteers across all areas of our hospice’s care, support services, and income generation – around half of our volunteers support our retail operations. Our volunteers’ time equates to more than £1 million pounds if we were to pay them a basic minimum wage. It truly shows how valuable our volunteers are in supporting care and support for families across our Wirral community.

Invitation to hear more about our work:

If you’d like to come for a tour of our hospice to see how our customers’ donations and purchases make a significant difference to our hospice care services, please email Teresa Nightingale at fundraising@wirralhospice.org

Thank you for all that you do to support our hospice; it means a lot and makes a huge difference to the care and support we provide for Wirral families.

Warmest wishes

Teresa Nightingale
Income Generation & Marketing Director