Within the vibrant walls of the Hospice Isle of Man Day Therapy Unit (DTU), a dedicated team of staff and volunteers work to enrich the lives of patients facing life-limiting illnesses. A member of this compassionate effort is Sandra Bearman whose insights shed light on the vital role the DTU plays in promoting wellbeing for patients. She offers a glimpse into the heart of this essential service, which, with support from the Manx Lottery Trust, resumed operations in 2023 after pandemic closures.

The DTU is a facility that provides outpatient care and support for individuals on the Hospice caseload. It takes place every Tuesday from 10am to 3pm.

It’s a dual purpose service that enhances the quality of life for patients, whilst at the same time providing day respite for family members caring for the individual.

It provides a safe environment, physically and emotionally, where patients can relax, receive therapeutic care and discuss concerns whilst enjoying social interaction with others in a similar health situation. Our aim is that the patients come and have a fun day where they can be themselves, be treated as individuals and feel valued.

For the carer, it gives them a break and an opportunity to have some time to do whatever it is they need or want to do.

It is a bit like a one stop shop for the patient.

The first therapy of the day is offered by our rehab team and involves gentle exercise for those who wish to participate - this is a lively and fun event involving music and much laughter. Later in the morning our patients are offered individual hand and shoulder massages by the complementary therapy team. During the day patients also get support through some low level talking therapy, and monthly our creative arts co-ordinator comes to support them too. This means the staff can continually assess a patient’s overall wellbeing and having access to all of this in one day is beneficial for the patient and the carer.

After lunch we have our ‘afternoon guests’ and are extremely fortunate as we get a lot of support from other Manx charities, organisations and groups who come in and give talks, and we regularly also have visits from some wonderful musical entertainers.

It’s very much driven by the patients, what it is they want to do and what will make their time here the best it can be. We even had an outing on the Karaoke bus as they had never been on one before!

We often hear how attending the DTU is the highlight of people’s week. We have had some patients who rarely got out of bed, but they came and spent a day with us and that is both humbling and a real honour.

It’s also interesting that a lot of the patients don’t want to come at the beginning, particularly the men. We suggest that they come and have a go, and if it isn’t for them, they can leave – but most of the time they end up staying and coming back.

Our patients know they are in safe hands and here they are valued, they can spend a day not talking about the fact that they have an illness and rather focus on joyful living. One patient described it as ‘like being with family in a front room’.

The biggest challenge is trying to create the right service for everybody. Although the service is for all adult age groups most patients currently attending are over 75. The activities are therefore tailored to this age group, which strengthens the perception that this is who we are aiming to support.

What we’d really like to do is establish a facility that can cater to different age groups and encourage more people to attend. We have a proportion of patients for example who are in their 40’s, 50s and 60s and what they would want from a service differs from what we currently offer. Some of our patients are still working, and they would benefit from an evening or weekend session. We just don’t have the funding to enable this.

We currently receive a £50,000 grant from the Hemmings Foundation which is our total annual budget. This covers a dedicated team of one part-time Nurse and two Health Care Assistants (HCAs) as well as all patient meals, activities and associated transport costs.

In October 2024 we launched the DTU Outreach service, whereby the DTU team visit patients in their own homes so that we could support those patients too poorly to continue to attend the DTU. This service quickly expanded to include those patients who struggle in a group setting, or those who just need a little extra support. We have the flexibility to adjust and tailor the service accordingly which really makes the difference.

Creating this service has reminded us to remember to take a step back every so often and think, what is best for the patient?

We are not in a position to make any radical changes to the service, but certainly, we have aspirations, and we would love to offer a more resilient and robust service. With more funding we could look to implement a younger persons support group, as well as offering a wider range of activities and focus a bit more on mental wellbeing. We’d also love to expand the outreach service with additional nursing cover so that the team can spend more time out in the community and visit patients on a more regular basis.