TODAY the Evening Times launches Brick by Brick ...

a campaign to help build a much-needed new hospice for Glasgow.

We are backing the Prince and Princess of Wales Hospice in its £15million plan to move from the city centre to a proposed new location next to Bellahouston Park.

The hospice has outgrown its current home in Carlton Place on the banks of the Clyde. The move will create a purpose-built facility designed to deliver the highest level of palliative care for everyone who needs it – patients, their families and, for the first time, young people between the ages of 15 and 25.

The existing hospice, which is spread over four historic townhouses, has served patients well over the years and it has been constantly adapted to ensure the highest possible quality of care.

But it is now pressed for space and cannot expand any further in the current building.

The hospice needs to raise £15m to make the dream a reality. And they can only do it with YOUR help.

Rhona Baillie, chief executive of the Prince and Princess of Wales Hospice, said: "Everybody asks me, 'Why now?'

"Well, we have the right team to do it and because we need it ... terminal illness won't wait. We need to do it now."

The new hospice, designed by city architects NORD, will include an in-patient unit which will offer all patients a single room for the first time, with access to both a social area as well as a private outdoor space.

There will be better parking, so families and friends will find it much easier to visit patients, and a larger café, day services and art room.

Rhona said: "We have coped really well with our current building, we've delivered high quality care for all these years, but we're moving for a number of reasons.

"We want to improve our family facilities, to allow them to stay 24 hours a day.

"They can do that in the existing hospice but we feel the space that they have could be much better, it's not enough.

"There's a population of young people that require palliative care and, we feel, our facilities aren't suitable for that – we need to modernise them.

"We're working with a number of agencies to help plan for the transition of young people between the ages of 15 and 18.

"We also have no outside space, having that will be absolutely fantastic, and it will be suitable for all ages.

"We want something that's future proof. The challenge has been to take a fantastic building like the one we already have, with this brilliant community spirit, and transport that into a new build. And I think we've cracked it."

The new building will be light, airy and modern, and in-patients will really notice the difference.

Rhona said: "Patients will be able to pull the whole side of their room back to open out on to a communal space, or they can close it for privacy.

"They'll all open out on to the gardens as well, so you've virtually got a double-ended room.

"The other thing that's really important is that absolutely everything within that room can be operated by the patients, they're able to control whether the blinds go up or down, the doors, they'll have their own fridge, their own en-suite.

"It's going to offer a lot more choice and will foster independence."

There will also be many more communal and private spaces on offer.

Rhona said: "It allows choice, whether you want to sit privately and have a moment of reflection or whether you want to mix with others.

"A key element of the design is the domestic-size front door, and as soon as you walk in you'll see a fireplace, so it makes you think of home. It's as least clinical as possible."

The Prince and Princess of Wales Hospice has touched thousands of lives and is loved by families across Glasgow.

The people who use the hospice can be at varying stages of illness.

They may have been recently diagnosed and need help in coming to terms with their condition, or they may require advanced pain relief or practical support to help them through the daily challenges of living with their illness.

It may be patients who require support in their own homes or those who sadly need end of life care.

The hospice cares for families too – the friends, relatives and carers who whose worlds have also been turned upside down, who need practical and emotional support.

Rhona added: "That's why the building needs to be so flexible, we are dealing with people who are extremely ill and at end of life, and people who have just been diagnosed, plus all the dynamics of the family – it's a really hard and emotional time for then".

And her fundraising call to the readers of the Evening Times is this.

"This is Glasgow's hospice and we want to deliver the absolute best quality of care we can and we need a new building, a new environment, to do that.

"We'd ask the people of Glasgow to support us the way they always have. We've got a fantastic support in Glasgow, it's absolutely overwhelming at times. People who have never experienced a hospice see it a certain way and there's a certain fear involved in that, and that is one of our biggest challenges – to break down that fear.

"The minute you walk in this door it doesn't feel like something that's frightening.

"Every single new person, without fail, that we show around the hospice, says to us at the end, 'this is not what we thought a hospice would be'."

linda.robertson@ eveningtimes.co.uk

YOUR CAMPAIGNING NEWSPAPER

The Evening Times is proud of its track record in raising vital funds for charities across Glasgow ... and we couldn't have done it without you.

You have helped transform thousands of lives by digging deep and donating to our fundraising campaigns over the years.

You raised £1million to buy the city's first MRI scanner and helped us smash our £500,000 target to build Scotland's first Maggie's Centre in Glasgow, donating around £1.2million for the cancer support facility in the West End.

You also raised a magnificent Magic Million to build a new Intensive Care Unit at the Royal Hospital for Sick Children at Yorkhill while our Big Build campaign brought in £15million to help create a new Marie Curie Hospice.

"The Evening Times has a long and successful history of campaigning and I'm always amazed and heartened by the lengths our readers will go to support charities in need," said Tony Carlin, editor of the Evening Times.

"The Prince and Princess of Wales Hospice provides an invaluable service for people with terminal illness and helps them achieve the best quality of life possible while offering emotional support to their families.

"We are fully behind the hospice's plan to raise £15million for a state-of-the-art new facility which will continue to provide the highest level of palliative care services.

"We kindly ask you, once again, to join us on this fundraising mission ... and help the hospice turn their dream into reality."