Virtual hospice provided much needed support to children and families during Covid-19

Written by Jill Cook, Volunteering Development Manager, Children's Hospices Across Scotland (CHAS).

Children’s Hospices Across Scotland’s (CHAS) number one priority during the pandemic has been ensuring that we continue to deliver care in the safest way possible. While we effectively cover the whole of Scotland, we have two main hospices that we chiefly operate out of: Robin’s House in the village of Balloch, West of Scotland, and Rachel’s House located in the East at Kinross. Including our CHAS at home service, we had just over 300 employees and a further 900 volunteers who unfortunately had to stand down at the start of the pandemic. With our reach extending across all of Scotland, we needed to mobilise the team incredibly quickly in order to create a virtual hospice that could continue to support families and children in need. After our team had converted online, we quickly decided on the new services that we needed to offer to our service users. What followed was the introduction of a range of virtual services, some new and some pre-existing, that successfully managed to support our communities across Scotland.