Rotary Club Malta helps Hospice Malta with their new St Michael Hospice

Hospice Malta provides and promotes palliative care for persons suffering from end of life cancer, and motor neuron disease. Throughout the years, as the awareness and need of their services increased, they extended their services to patients suffering from end of life cardiac, respiratory, renal and liver diseases.
 
Hospice has embarked on an ambitious project to build a new in-patient care facility in Santa Venera which is being called St Michael's Hospice, to accommodate sixteen in-house patients.  Rotary Club Malta, together with Rotary Club La Valette, have jointly agreed to support Hospice Malta in this project by purchasing and furnishing the sixteen bedrooms.  This project is being undertaken with the support of a grant from the Rotary Foundation, as well as the support of companies and individuals that have assisted Rotary in its fund raising for this deserving project.  
 
This is another humanitarian project our club is undertaking in keeping with our motto, Service Above Self, 
 
Hospice Malta Movement was founded in January 1989 and is a registered NGO that offers all its services free of charge to patients in Malta and Gozo. It provides relief from pain and other distressing symptoms, offers a support system to help patients live as actively as possible until death. It also provides other services to enable the patient to receive psychological and spiritual aspects of care.
 
Hospice Malta offers its services through a professional multi-disciplinary team with the assistance of a number of volunteers. It delivers Home Care to advise patients delivered by professionals that include doctors, nurses, psychologists, and social volunteers. A Day Care Therapy Service within the Hospice premises, offering various activities for patients who visit for a morning, is also provided.  Group and individual physiotherapy is carried out in the pool allowing patients to carry out some passive physical exercises.  This also allows relatives some time off knowing that their loved ones are in good care. 
 
Respite care is also provided at the patients’ home to support and offer respite to the family.   An important and much used service is the loaning of walking aids, electric beds, syringe drivers to alleviate pain and many other necessary equipment needed by patients. Hospice Malta has now gone one further giant step forward by extending its palliative services to include an in-patient service with 16 bedrooms at the new St. Michael Hospice in Santa Venera, still under construction. 
 
We are pleased to have taken up this project since Hospice Malta has given much to the community and deserves to be supported by Rotary Club Malta and Rotary Club La Valette.