St Nicholas Hospice Care has teamed up with the East Anglian Daily Times Mercury to launch a £10,000 campaign to boost facilities in Orchard Day Therapy.
The day patient area is an integral part of the Hospice, allowing people to feel more confident with the many challenges of living with a life-threatening illness while helping to maximise quality of life.
Orchard Day Therapy offers a tailored range of supportive and social activities whether physical, emotional or spiritual. It can help patients with specialist support, for instance relaxation techniques or coping with fatigue, or it can simply offer a calming place to have a cup of tea or take part in art therapy.
Ursula Noyce, Lead Registered Nurse for Orchard Day Therapysaid: "Orchard enables patients to make friends and speak with like-minded people. We find that some patients have lost some self-confidence or have not been able to get out in recent times and we are able to work with them in giving back some of the confidence lost.”
“The Hospice rightly has a fantastic reputation for its delivery of specialist care in the communities of both Bury St Edmunds and Sudbury and the work undertaken within Orchard is typical of this."
Orchard Day Therapy runs every Tuesday and Wednesday over 44 weeks 
of the year – but the valuable service comes at a great cost.
The generosity of Mercury readers could make a massive difference to the lives of Orchard patients and the service offered by the unit.
£10,000 equates to a third of all nursing costs for a year or covers the entire amount needed to pay for vital patient transport costs, where Hospice volunteers pick up and take home Orchard patients where necessary.
Mercury Series Editor Mark Crossley said: “We are delighted to launch this vital campaign with St Nicholas Hospice Care to raise money for the fantastic services offered by Orchard Day Therapy. I urge readers of the both the Bury St Edmunds and Sudbury Mercury newspapers to get behind the campaign and help the appeal grow.”
