Stories for Life

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. This means that we will need to train some 400 volunteer Hospice Biographers in total. For good practical reasons each volunteer will live reasonably close to the hospice we’ve 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. We will be collating Britain’s largest audio archive of its kind ever created. 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. This proposed nationwide charity will be unique, the only one of its kind in Britain.


****We are always looking for volunteers from across the UK in a variety of different roles. We would love to hear from you!*****

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Here is news of our latest hospice road trip from Eastbourne to Edinburgh!