PATIENTS and staff at two Oxfordshire hospices are celebrating after securing £640,000 to spend on improvments.

The Department of Health announced the grants to help improve facilities at Helen & Douglas House, in Oxford, and Katharine House, in Adderbury, near Banbury.

Douglas House has been awarded £245,562 for a number of improvements, while Katharine House will get £395,000 to upgrade accommodation for patients.

Douglas House is in the final stages of building a £1m extension. It is hoped work on the schemes funded by the grant will follow this project, with the aim of completing the improvements within three months.

David Pastor, director of support services, said: “We’re absolutely thrilled they have given us the full funding for all the aspects we want to improve.”

It is planned to modify the kitchen and bar area, convert an assisted shower into a bathroom, create a reception area, install a patient hoist in the lounge and provide a secure drugs administration area.

Mr Pastor said: “I want these areas to be more orientated to disabled people. The bar, for example, is very high, so if you’re in a wheelchair, you can’t see what to order – it has lovely comfy chairs but again if you use a wheelchair, that’s of no interest to you.

“What we will do is put a lower bar in and rising tables, so people can adjust them to the right height.”

Only 15 per cent of the hospice’s annual £4.5m running costs comes from public sector funding, including some from NHS Oxfordshire, the county’s primary care trust, to pay for clinical staff.

The rest has to be applied for through grants, often on a case-by-case basis for individual patients, and from community fundraising.

Helen & Douglas House’s head of fundraising, Jo Mitchell, said: “This grant is not only great news for Douglas House patients, because we will be able to make big improvements to the facilities here, but it also means we can now focus our fundraising efforts on bringing in money to pay for the continuing costs, such as nursing and medical care.”

Katharine House hospice, which costs £2.4m a year to run, had applied for just over £589,000 to convert two single rooms into family rooms, provide a new assisted bathroom, and create a meeting room.

Business director Elizabeth Wheeldon said: “We’re delighted to hear that we have been awarded this grant.

“We were hoping to be awarded the full amount and will have to consider very carefully how we could fund the balance in such a short time-frame.”

She said the charity would look at using money from its reserves to cover the shortfall.

She added: “We would be very disappointed not to go ahead, because it would mean a great deal to the families and patients and it also makes a great deal of difference to the nursing staff.”

For more information about the hospices, see helenanddouglas.org.uk and katharinehouse.co.uk