At Prospect Hospice, we provide outstanding, personalised and compassionate care for everyone in Swindon, Marlborough and the surrounding areas affected by a life-limiting illness, completely free of charge. For more than 40 years, we’ve been a dedicated, non-hospital, end-of-life care service for patients and their loved ones - around the clock, every day of the year. Our mission is to ensure that anyone can access the best possible expert care whenever and wherever they need it – whether at the hospice or in their own home. As a charity, we only exist because of the generosity and support of our amazing local community.
Find out about the range of end-of-life care services that we offer to patients and their families. These delivered free of charge and are designed to provide compassionate, personalised support during every stage of a life-limiting illness in every kind of care setting, to anyone who needs it.
We couldn’t do what we do without considerable support from our local community. Find out all the different ways in which you can support Prospect Hospice, including fundraising, volunteering and purchasing from our shops. All contributions are greatly appreciated and enables us to deliver care that is free of charge to our patients and their families.
Our café sits at the heart of our hospice in Wroughton and serves a range of delicious home cooked meals to suit all tastes. Whether you're looking to catch up with friends over lunch or relax with coffee and cake, our Heart of the Hospice café has you covered.
Whether shopping with us in person or online, or donating your pre-loved goods, we thank you for supporting us through our shops where you help to raise around £2million a year for Prospect Hospice.
We pride ourselves on being a great place to work and we're always looking for outstanding people to join our team at the hospice across all areas of the charity.
Prospect Hospice is the leading provider of education and training for end-of-life care in Swindon and north Wiltshire. Working closely with you, our colleagues within partner organisations, we want to ensure that the very best care is available to everyone facing the end of life. This is why we provide education and development opportunities, all of which aim to encourage learning and build confidence in end of life care and support.
We are a Neurodiversity friendly charity, where we always build our care around an individual’s needs. This year for Neurodiversity Celebration Week, we asked one of our clinical team who was recently diagnosed as neurodivergent, what her diagnosis means to her and how labels can be both helpful and hurtful. Read her honest account here…
ADHD, what has made more sense since diagnosis?
Labels, we all have them, and give them out, either to describe ourselves or other people. Some complimentary, some not so. Some based on fact and some on opinion. Some of the labels are permanent and others come and go. One label recently attached to me was ADHD. This label was hard to accept to begin with, and it left so many questions but with time it’s also enabled me to make so much sense of who I am and the challenges I’ve faced. I’ve looked at some of my labels and how these have been affected by an ADHD diagnosis, this list could be so much longer, but hopefully this will highlight that diagnosis has helped make sense on my world and has been beneficial.
Label – disorganised, lazy and unreliable: ADHD helped me to recognise that the difficulties I have in organisation are not just because I’m lazy, this disorganisation affects everything- from organising my home, managing money, attending appointments and organising my day, my life is led by routine in order to keep control but often this became boring and chaos would ensue as I told myself I didn’t need it!
Appointments or plans take a whole day out the diary, a doctors appointment, meeting friends at lunch time or a meeting planned for 3pm take a whole day’s planning and focusing on. To ensure I’m not late or no mistakes are made, deadlines and timescales are really important. Even with planning I frequently miss appointments or get the time wrong if my mind is busy. My diagnosis made me see that this is ok, and I’m working on ways to make this so much more manageable
Label – easily distracted: ADHD was able to help me understand why my mind was always so noisy and busy, the internal criticism and why it is so difficult to concentrate, I hadn’t appreciated that not everyone experienced this all day everyday (and night). Why people became frustrated with me because whilst having a conversation with someone I’d swap and change subjects or leave the conversation completely – in my mind all these conversations were happening at the same time, anyway, how was I supposed to know everyone else wasn’t doing the same!
Label – overly sensitive: ADHD helped me to understand why on some days the world seems too noisy, the lights are too bright, or my clothes hurt my skin. Most of the time its manageable but after a really busy day or a stressful time my socks hurt me, or my waist band hurt on my trousers. When the fire alarm goes off it takes a long time to get over the noise yet everyone else carries on as normal. I learnt this was sensory overload and although id experienced it my entire life certain small changes made life so much more bearable.
Label – accident prone, clumsy: ADHD helped me understand that the sensory overload was what made me clumsy, not because I wasn’t aware of my body or my surroundings but because I’m so busy processing everything else going on.
Label – always tired: ADHD means that by the time I get to the end of the day I’m exhausted, over stimulated and ready to shut down, school bus journeys home used to be spent asleep! It all made so much sense on diagnosis. Sleep at night time? That depends on how busy my head is, 3am house work is often happening.
Label – overly sensitive and emotional: ADHD means I have a higher anxiety and emotional response to almost everything. my responses are not always weighed up and balanced in the moment, meaning that I have a physical reaction often as well as an emotional response. My diagnosis has helped me see that I just need time to process information and that I didn’t need to spend all those years getting in trouble for the way I responded if I’d just had time and the opportunity to talk things through
Label – quiet, loner, poor social skills, unreliable: ADHD helped me understand why social interaction is such hard work. if someone doesn’t smile or acknowledge you at you as they walk past, or a new person arrives in a social or work setting and the work that takes.
This also helped to understand why people think I’m rude or abrupt or unsociable, when in reality anxiety around the interaction is very high, eye contact is hard and I’ve gone through the conversation multiple times in my mind, before even introducing myself, on the flipside if I’m overwhelmed, busy, stressed I often speak before I’ve thought it though and this has often got me in trouble! Going to large social events is overwhelming and despite wanting to be there I have to leave early due to overwhelm.
Much of the time I really wish I was able to be like others around me, but so many positives have and are coming from diagnosis. I’ve worked really hard, so hard in fact , to see the world differently to how I’ve been living it my entire life, the skills of masking I’d learnt growing up are exhausting, and whilst I still use them daily I rely less on masking alone, the recognition of the differences I have and learning strategies to manage in a world where I don’t always feel I fit in, have been really helpful.
I have no desire to change my label of being quirky or my ability to hyperfocus on the things that matter to me or the compassion and empathy that ADHD has given me, because those bits are amazing. My Label of ADHD has enabled me to make sense of some of the other labels that have been attached to me throughout my life, and also who I am. ADHD, its not an excuse for my behaviour, or for anyone else to judge but it gives an explanation to all those other labels and an opens up a toolbox to enable me to adapt.
10 March 2025
03 March 2025