Caring for our Wirral community for forty years

Wirral Hospice St John’s has been more than 40 years in the making.

Our founding group spent a number of years, from the mid 1970s, planning, engaging with other health professionals, inspiring 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^th 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.

Click on the headings immediately below to see stories from the very early days

(Some of the organisations advertising that you’ll see in the following pages may no longer be around)

The Vision. A Driving Force. Choosing a Name. Appealing to our Community.

Our ‘Temporary’ Hospice. The Pioneer Staff

Preparing for Patients

The ‘Temporary’ Hospice Opens. The Early Days

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, liver and kidney diseases and more, to live as well as possible with incurable illnesses.

The original hospice opened at, what is now, Clatterbridge Health Park in 1983, developing into purpose-built facilities here by 1990.

Thereafter, what had been an Inpatients ward was expanded to offer a day service, now called The Wellbeing Centre, and Outpatients clinics to complement befriending and bereavement services in our Patient and Family support services.

Nowadays we’re even more accessible to Wirral people via our Hospice at Home service which supports and enables our patients who wish to remain at home.

Many, many, heartfelt thanks are owed to all those individuals, businesses and other organisations, whose support now, and ever since those early days, allows us to deliver all of our services, free of charge.

More details of the present day services we provide can be found via our Patients and Professionals page.

If you’d like know more about how you can support our fundraising efforts visit our How you can Help page. 

if you’d like to contribute to our future, we have an online survey that you are invited to share your thoughts with us.