Chief Executive’s Message

A word from our Chief Executive, Helen Brown

Wirral Hospice St John’s has been delivering compassionate care and enabling support for people with complex life-limiting conditions for more than forty years now.

Inspired by the acclaimed founder of the modern hospice movement, Dame Cicely Saunders, our own founding group spent a number of years, from the mid 1970s, planning, engaging volunteers and supporters to fundraise and, when everything was in place, recruited an experienced and motivated team of nurses, doctors and other allied health professionals to be in a strong position for our official opening on 24 June, 1983.

Everything was built on providing a haven where people with, in those days, predominantly, cancer, could be given the most compassionate care and support to live out their final days as comfortably and pain-free as possible.

Nowadays, with the continuing support of our whole Wirral community, we have expanded our care and support to help people with a whole range of life-limiting conditions, including cancer, COPD, motor neurone disease and other heart, liver and kidney diseases, to live as well as possible with their insurable illnesses.

We passionately believe that a life-limiting diagnosis should not limit, as far as is practically possible, a person’s quality of life.

We provide compassionate care and support for patients and their loved ones:

– outpatients’ clinics
– wellbeing centre (day services)
– Hospice at Home
– inpatient ward

We also provide advice for patients, families and professionals via a 24hr Wirral Palliative Care Services & Advice Line

As well as a complementary range of patient and family support services.

Our services are completely FREE of charge to everyone who uses them. This is due, in large part, to the continued generosity of our Wirral community who make a massive contribution through fundraising activities and events, donating money directly, leaving Gifts in their Wills, and / or giving hours of their precious time every year as a Hospice Hero volunteer.

We’re also held in high esteem by our colleagues in the health professions. We work in collaboration with our colleagues in health; Cheshire & Merseyside Integrated Care Board, our local Primary Networks of GP Practices, Wirral University Teaching Hospital (WUTH), charities like Marie Curie and Macmillan, and Wirral’s community nurses and matrons. Through such co-operation, the very best medical and clinical practice for people with life-limiting consitions is discussed, shared and implemented, to hospice standards, in other settings where agreed and appropriate.

Looking a little further forward we recognise that complex changes taking place in the health sector will bring challenges, particularly financial, to meet an anticipated increase in demand for our services. We’re very hopeful therefore that the fiscal position we have achieved through sound planning over recent years will still allow some prudent funding for further development, so that our services will further benefit our Wirral whole community.

We are continuing to build on the vision and commitment of our founding group, which brought people from all across our local community together.

To everyone: staff, trustees, ambassadors, volunteers, and our wonderful supporters (individuals, families, groups, and other organisations), then and now, we are so grateful to you and all those who will help us to meet our goals in the future.

Warmest wishes and a heartfelt thank you
Helen

Helen Brown, Chief Executive – Wirral Hospice St John’s

Other pages that might be of interest to you:

– CEO & Senior Leadership Team
– Board of Trustees
– Wirral Hospice’s Values
– Strategy, Impact & Collaborative Working
– Quality Care, Finance Reports & Position Statements
– Wirral Palliative Care Education Hub
– Cheshire & Merseyside Hospice Provider Collaborative

This page was last updated 22.03.2026