Every hospice in the country, and the places that do not have one
There is a public list of hospices. There is a public measure of how poor each part of England is. This puts them side by side — and the answer is not the one the argument assumes.
This is a list, not a service, and nobody here can arrange care. If somebody is dying and you do not know what to do, the people who can act tonight are their GP surgery’s out-of-hours number, the district nursing team, or NHS 111. A hospice normally takes referrals from one of those rather than directly from a family.
304hospices in the public finder
A count of places, not of organisations. Marie Curie appears nine times and Sue Ryder six: one charity, several hospices.
256care for adults
Including 16 that care for both adults and children.
64care for children
Children’s hospices work with families for years rather than days.
120 of 296English districts have no hospice address in them
Which is not the same as having no hospice care, and the difference is the whole of the next section.
The finding, and it runs the other way
The argument you hear about hospices is that they follow the money: that where people can afford to give, there is a hospice, and where they cannot, there is not. It is a reasonable thing to expect. Set against the published measure of deprivation, it does not hold.
| English districts | How many | Share of their neighbourhoods in the most deprived tenth nationally |
|---|---|---|
| With a hospice address in them | 176 | 9.8% |
| With none | 120 | 4.7% |
Districts that have a hospice are more deprived than districts that do not, by about 9.8% to 4.7%. The likeliest reason is dull and worth saying: hospices are in towns and cities, and towns and cities contain most of the country’s poorest neighbourhoods. The places with no hospice building are disproportionately rural and suburban.
That is a finding about buildings, and it settles nothing about funding. Whether hospices in poorer places raise less, and are therefore thinner on the ground than their population needs, is a different question. The register records each charity’s total income, but not where it was raised or where it was spent, and many of these hospices are one site of a charity that runs several. We have not answered it and this page does not pretend to.
See which districts, and what the claim does not mean →
What this is for
Two readers, and they want opposite things.
- Somebody looking for a hospice. The finder is there and it works. What it does not do is let you start from your question rather than from a postcode, so this adds that: who it is for, what the register records it as doing, and where it is.
- Somebody arguing about hospices. There is a serious public argument going on about how hospice care is paid for. It is being conducted almost entirely in assertions. This is one small part of it counted.
This was built without asking you, from information you already publish, to show what is possible rather than to speak for you. Nothing here has been sent to any hospice. If you would rather it came down, say so and it comes down, and you do not have to give a reason. If you would rather it were built properly, that is the more interesting conversation.