Mary Stevens Hospice near Stourbridge had a visit from three goalkeepers from Villa and Albion. They were there to look around and to plug the charity match coming up raising money for the Hospice.
00:00 So Amanda you're in safe hands when you're at Mary Stevens Hospice.
00:03 Here's the punchline. And we've got three pairs of safe hands here.
00:07 The keepers for Albion and Aston Villa.
00:11 Just fill us in on what's going on today then Amanda.
00:13 Okay so the guys have come today to have a walk round the hospice and to see the work that we do.
00:17 And to see why their visit is so important and all the support that we get from the Football Day is so important to the work that we do here.
00:24 We're delighted to have them and to show them what we actually do to support our community.
00:29 So I've kind of caught you lads half way round on the tour so you've not seen it all yet.
00:33 But have you ever been to a place like this before?
00:36 Yeah we've done a few visits to Acorns and other hospices.
00:41 Yeah a lot of good work at Acorns.
00:43 Yeah we've been to similar places.
00:47 And you're at Villa and Albion. Are you Villa and Albion fans?
00:54 I personally am an Albion fan.
00:57 Oh right well done.
00:59 My father in law has a season ticket at the Villa so he'll be very impressed that I've met some of you guys.
01:07 So what are your thoughts on coming here today then?
01:09 Do you think it's quite important as an ambassador of the community, as a footballer to get out and meet people and see what's going on in the community you're serving?
01:18 Do you think that's important then?
01:20 Yeah definitely I think. You can be called a fan in a football world and sometimes it's good to come out of that and get yourself involved in the community.
01:29 So yeah it's great for us to come out and support the great work that they do.
01:34 And you'd second that as well lads?
01:36 Yeah definitely. It's good to not only raise awareness but be aware of ourselves and try and help and realise that we're quite committed.
01:47 So keepers, who's inspirational keepers for you? Who were the figures you looked up to as a young sportsman then?
01:54 Joe Hart myself.
01:56 Shropshire lad isn't he Joe Hart?
01:59 Yeah, and Manuel Noura. Mine was Van der Sar. Man United when I was growing up they were winning everything.
02:13 Cool, well I'll let you continue with your tour. Thank you lads.
02:17 So that's when they come for their 8 week programme of care. Therapies are slightly different, they can come every week as needed.
02:25 But there doesn't tend to be a waiting list as such so that's really good. They've set one of the therapy rooms up here so you can have a little look.
02:35 So when we refer this out it was really important to us to keep this aspect of hospice care, so hospices have got to be looking after this.
02:47 Because we don't get any funding for it but to us here we've really thought that the value of it to patients and to families and to bereaved people is so tangible we had to keep it.
03:00 So we know we're funding this, to us that's massively important. We only have one pain therapist on the team, everybody else are volunteers.
03:11 So we've got within the hospice itself currently 100 volunteers, we used to have 250 pre-covid but we lost a lot of volunteers just because of their age.
03:23 But we're back up to 100 volunteers now.
03:26 [Loud banging]
03:49 One of the big things we want to do is really increase the volume of people coming through day unit.
03:55 We want to be able to admit patients seven days a week onto our inpatient unit and offer some kind of service in the community.
04:03 Whether that's running a virtual wall so we keep an eye on the people that are poorly in community and put calls into them.
04:12 And if they need to come in we can get them in for help or whether it's us going into their home so we're really looking at expanding our reach over the next three years.
