New restaurant venture opens … in a hospice
The hospice movement is under growing financial strain and is always looking for new income streams. Leigh Jones reports.
SCARBOROUGH’S latest bistro offers diners a casual experience with Mediterraneaninspired decor. Head chef Jon Smith is well-known in the area for his previous work, including his time as head chef for nine years at The Plough in nearby Scalby village, and for running the Peppers restaurant for 14 years in the seaside town.
The focus of his most recent venture, Flavours, is on serving the community in both Scarborough and from further afield in North Yorkshire, on-site at Saint Catherine’s hospice.
“I decided to join Saint Catherine’s because I was ready for a new challenge and it’s not often as a chef you get the chance to do what you love but also find a way to give something back to a local community and a fabulous cause,” he says of the new venture.
At first it appears to be a strange idea, but Margaret Middlebrook MBE, chair of the trustees for the hospice, explains the logic behind opening a restaurant there to The Yorkshire Post as being important in removing taboos around the sector.
“Yes it’s an income stream for us, but it’s also somewhere the community can come and be on a hospice site, and realise hospices are not places where you have lots of dead and dying people lying around in corridors,” she says.
“Actually, a hospice is a very joyful place, because the whole purpose is to enable people to live as well as they can for as long as they can. The great thing is the day we opened the bistro we had an outpatient and his wife come in to have some lunch, and the lady said to me, ‘That’s the most I’ve seen him eat for months’. That’s why we do it.”
Saint Catherine’s, officially opened in 1985 by Princess Margaret, has also put solar panels on its roof, and is installing electric vehicle charging stations on-site. “We’ll be able to offer to people in the community to charge their cars at a reasonable rate – so it benefits the community, and it benefits us as well,” says Margaret.
The reality is that Saint Catherine’s is having to diversify its revenue streams because hospice funding in the UK is in crisis.
“Our services cost £5.9m a year to run, which is £11,000 a day,” says Margaret. “To me, that £11,000 a day is scary money. This year, we’re expecting our deficit will be a million, which isn’t sustainable. Nobody can sustain that.”
Ruth Driscoll, associate director for policy & public affairs for hospice charity Marie Curie, describes the situation as “a perfect storm”.
Last month, she gave evidence to MPs in Parliament to highlight the crisis. She says there’s a need for greater integration between the NHS and the hospice sector.
“When you look forward, the crisis starts to feel even larger. Demand for these services is rising really fast because our population is ageing,” she says. “By 2045 the number of people aged 85 or over will double. There’ll be 136,000 more deaths each year, compared to this year.”
One of the issues contributing to the “perfect storm” is the role of Integrated Care Boards (ICBs). They were set up as part of the reforms of the Health and Care Act 2022, as local bodies commissioning services to support the NHS. However, according to research by Marie Curie, they’re not prioritising palliative and end-of-life care, despite having a statutory obligation to commission these services.
“50 per cent of the ICBs who responded to our survey told us they had not made or do not plan to make significant capital investment in palliative and end-of-life care,” says Ms Driscoll. “Over 40 per cent told us their current investment in these services isn’t sufficient to meet the needs of their local community, or that they didn’t know if it was sufficient. By their own account, they’re not investing in these services.
“There is a real problem in the way the funding is given, really what we need is a new funding model, one that doesn’t rely so heavily on charitable fundraising.”