Centre to care for 100 day patients

The hospice's new £1.3 million day therapy centre in Park Lee Road, Blackburn, replaces old facilities which hospice manager Lyn Stevenson described as a "corridor".

It means the charity, will be able to help around day care 100 patients a week with physiotherapy and alternative therapies, counselling and advice, as well as continuing to provide the 10 inpatient beds it has done for 16 years.

Supporters were reminded of the reason for all their hard work when 27-year-old Vanessa Lockyer, whose boyfriend Kenny Cruickshank, died in the hospice in October 1998, gave a speech.

She read extracts from her diary on Kenny's first days in the hospice. She said: "He had never been to a hospice before and thought it was a place where people go to die.

"But he soon realised otherwise. The good thing was the way the staff treated him as a whole person and not just someone who was ill. It was the quality of life. There is no point in having an extra year if you aren't going to be able to do anything with it."

Vanessa, now a nurse in Manchester, also climbed Mount Kilimanjaro with a group of friends, raising £4,000 for the hospice, after Kenny died.

Chairman Geoffrey Braithwaite admitted the launch of the appeal to raise the funds for the new centre in 1999 was a daunting prospect.

"I always believed we could do it, although getting £726,000 from the National Lottery gave us a big lift. Before that we had still said we were going to do it, but that made things much easier.

"One of the problems we do face now is that we had to raise £120,000 a year to run the old hospice. With this new centre, we need to raise £180,000 on top of that."

Fundraiser Stuart Andrew, said: "This dream has become a reality and we now have a first class facility. Without the support of the general public and the National Lottery community fund we could never have achieved what we have."