The Hospice Biographers

www.thehospicebiographers.com The Hospice Biographers is a nationwide charity that offers terminally ill patients the chance to have their life stories professionally recorded on audio for their relief and pleasure and so that their families will be able to hear their voices and memories for generations to come. Patient's life stories will be recorded by trained interviewers free of charge and year round at some 200 hospices across the UK. Our aim is to offer terminally ill patients at some 200 hospices across Britain the chance to have their life stories recorded on audio for their pleasure and relief and so that their families will still be able to hear their voices and precious memories long after they’ve died. The recordings will be made at a hospice day care or outpatient setting. Each patient will thereafter be given a USB or CD for them to keep forever. All recordings will be confidential and will be offered to patients free of charge. The volunteers who will conduct these audio interviews will be journalists who will be recruited, DBS checked and specially trained by this charity. For continuity of care, we will recruit two volunteers per hospice, one “lead” volunteer plus one “standby” volunteer. For good practical reasons each volunteer will live reasonably close to the hospice assigned them to. They will be required to conduct their hospice interviews once a month, across ten months each year. For this charity’s long term legacy we will become subject to independent academic scrutiny and therapeutic evaluation. We will also create a nationwide secure audio storage space so that relatives may gain access to lost audio interviews if they ever need to. With the help and co-operation of the national representative body Hospice UK and the National Council for Palliative Care we estimate that we will be able to roll out this service across England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland within three years.