Busy volunteer is making a real difference for people in Wigan

Having moved around the country during her career as a consultant surgeon and spending 20 years living in Leeds, she settled in Standish in June 2019.

Just a year later she stepped forward to volunteer as a trustee with Wigan and Leigh Hospice.

Sheila, 69, said: “The Wigan Observer was responsible for my involvement. When I moved here, I read an article about the hospice needing new trustees and I thought, ‘that’s me’.”

The trustees are responsible for the governance of the hospice and look at all aspects of the way it works.

“The part of it that’s of particular interest to me is that I was a cancer surgeon and later on a medical researcher and I did my PhD on patient experience of care right through to end of life.

“Then I did some research back in Leeds, where I was living at the time, with the hospice team there on people being given the confidence to adjust their own medication within recommendations and therefore achieve better symptom control towards the end of life,” she said.

Sheila thought she had the right skills to get involved and was inspired by the “innovative” way the hospice aims to make care as good as it can be and available to as many people as possible.

She said: “It’s a combination of the parts of the hospice that people know about - that’s the wonderful in-patient unit - but to me it’s the way that it’s a really good network with the outreach community work. The fact that they have good links now to 71 care settings, to all the care homes across the network, they are able to look after so many patients. I think they saw about 1,200 last year.”

Sheila is a member of three committees at the hospice, alongside other trustees from various backgrounds and with a range of skills.

She said: “As trustees we are all volunteers. We are doing this because we care about the hospice and we want to do our bit and give whatever we can to support it.”

With the height of the coronavirus pandemic seemingly over, Sheila is now looking at other ways to make a difference.

She is keen to meet more of the volunteers in person and wants to look at all aspects of the hospice, including its finances.

She said: “Clearly the shops are a wonderful generator of income, but of course they have been pretty well closed for most of the last two years. It has left an unplanned gap in the finances.

“No-one would ever think of not funding birth, but really national and NHS funding for end of life, which everybody is going to come to, is far less generous.

“Of course we are grateful for the support that does come through, and big thanks to the people of Wigan and Leigh because so many people do support the hospice.”

Sheila, who has two sons, is planning to help the charity in another way - by doing a sky dive to mark her 70th birthday in September!

It is not the first time she has taken up a voluntary role to support an organisation - she received a scholarship to attend Bolton School as a child and spent 37 years as a governor there.

She is also involved with St Wilfrid’s Church in Standish, where she became a lay minister during the pandemic.

Sheila was licensed during a ceremony on Zoom in November 2020 and has had to deal with restrictions since becoming a minister.

She said: “Church has always been important. It’s very different, but it is still about caring for people and being willing to talk to them.

“We are now taking communion to care homes again and in a limited way started to be able to take it to people in their own homes. When I do that, I talk to them about how they are and try to be supportive. The extra bit of being a minister is I can pray with them if they would like me to.”

Sheila also made an unplanned return to the medical profession during the pandemic, when the General Medical Council appealed for doctors to help.

She said: “I got involved in staff support at Wigan Infirmary as a volunteer in the early days, when people who had never worn PPE were finding it really difficult. I have done 12-hour operations in it so at least I knew how it felt.

“When the vaccination programme started, I thought that was a good use of my skills.

“I started as a volunteer vaccinator but it became clear they needed doctors to supervise and do medical queries in the clinics, so I became part of the workforce again, which was not what I expected to be doing at this stage in my life.”

Sheila has been involved in clinical supervision at the Robin Park vaccination centre ever since, as well as taking jabs to people in care homes, schools and colleges and their own homes.

She said: “I have seen people for a very short time, but there are some great stories of joy and relief of people finally getting this, to the heartbreak of it coming too late for someone else.

“This time last year we were doing the older members of our community and some of them were in their 90s and had not been out for months.”

Sheila made such an impact that she was shortlisted as a Returner Champion at the Greater Manchester Health and Social Care Champions Awards.

Although she did not win, she was delighted to be nominated for the prestigious honour.

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