Following the news in today’s paper, we would like to clarify some of the points made which may have led to some confusion.

The closure of the Tendring Centre

The planned closure of the Tendring Centre does not mean the closure of services – all services currently run at the Centre will continue at an alternative location in the local area.

We are hugely grateful for the dedicated support of the local community and cannot thank you enough for your continued fundraising efforts to support St Helena.

The money raised goes towards running St Helena, which includes the services we run at the Tendring Centre. What we don’t want is for your money to be spent on paying for a building which is no longer cost effective when we know we can deliver the same support to patients, families and carers as we do now, for less, at other premises.

We also want to grow the services offered to people in Tendring to reach out to those who need our help who aren’t yet receiving it. This can be done best by offering these from premises that are more cost effective.

We recognise just how much the Centre has meant to patients and families, staff, volunteers and supporters over the years, and understand there is a lot of sadness over this. However, our care is more than just a building – our services are provided wherever the patient requires it – at home, through our 24/7 SinglePoint help line, as well as at The Hospice in Colchester.

Management costs

We also want to assure people that the headline today is misleading.

Our management costs are similar to other hospices and charities and the increase in the costs of running St Helena and its services has increased due to the introduction of new services, including our 24/7 Singlepoint help line and coordination centre and the expansion of existing services including our Hospice in the Home community services; and our Bereavement Support.

We now help over 50% more local people to face incurable illness and bereavement each year as a result of those changes, and to help fund the extension of these services, we had to invest more in our Retail, Lottery and fundraising.

The increase in costs has been led by these changes to our services and has not impacted on the decision to close the Tendring Centre.

All our management costs are published on the Charity Commissions website annually and can be accessed by anyone at any time.

Senior Management team costs:

2016 - £527,851 (Comparative from 2016 accounts)

2017 - £481,599

2018 - £486,528

As part of ongoing efforts to deliver our care more cost effectively we have actually reduced management costs since 2016 by 9%. We changed the way we report in 2017 to include pension costs in order to be more transparent.

The Senior Management team costs include those for our Clinical Director, an experienced local GP, and our Director of Care, an experienced nurse consultant. Both roles are vital to ensure we provide high quality expert care to over 4,000 people we help each year.

We are fortunate to have an experienced and well qualified senior management team, all of whom could be earning greater salaries if they worked in the public or private sectors.

As we do for all staff, we externally benchmark our senior staff salaries with other charities and similar organisations to ensure we pay the going rate and no more. All decisions on senior salaries are taken by a Remuneration Committee made up of trustees from our Board.

To provide the right support to our patients and families we also require effective management and coordination of a range of highly qualified nurses, doctors, allied health professionals, counsellors and support workers as well as volunteers. To fund the care and support we also need the right management for our varied and complex income generation and support services too.

We recognise that management costs can be contentious in an organisation so reliant on volunteers. We are extremely grateful for their contribution and simply would not be able to help so many local people without them.