4 minute read
stories from the handprint walls
When asked what the first thing that comes to mind when you think of Tˆy Hafan is, answers are likely to be really varied. But what has always hit visitors to the hospice is how bursting with colour it is, from its unique atmosphere to the characters you meet and, of course, the vibrant handprint walls.
Walking into the heart of the hospice, you are greeted by hand and footprints of all shapes, sizes and colours. The walls have been decorated with these snapshots of a time and place for as long as our doors have been open. They are a huge part of the hospice and so important to those who have left their mark. Memory making is a large part of what we do at Tˆy Hafan and something tangible like the handprints help to make the connection to the happy times spent together last. From Tˆy Hafan children and their families to our patron, HRH The Prince of Wales, these walls illustrate a large part of the Tˆy Hafan story, providing the backdrop for the hand and footprints of those children who pass through our lives all too quickly but leave such an indelible impression. Tˆy Hafan will mean different things to different people, but remembrance is undoubtedly one of our most important elements. To be able to revisit the walls and see these impressions from a different time means so much to families, knowing that there is a place where their precious child will never be forgotten. After more than 20 years of constant use, the walls have had their fair share of dinks and chips. So, to keep it fresh and provide more space to allow us to continue this tradition, as part of the hospice refurbishment, we’ve looked for new ways to preserve the prints. Every print on every wall has been painstakingly digitised, highlighting the faded ones and grouping families, they have then been reproduced onto Perspex and placed in front of the originals so they are protected behind the new walls. It’s a way of ensuring the longevity of the prints and retaining the originals, while staying in keeping with the refurbishment work that is so essential to the way we provide expert care to our families. Families can now see how the new look walls turned out and are able to start adding to them. There are lots of things about our newly refurbished hospice to be excited about, but it really does all start with our famous handprint walls.
from super sib to super nurse
Meg Fears, 23, has recently joined our Care Team as one Tˆy Hafan’s specialist palliative care nurses. We caught up with Meg and asked her to share her experiences to help us to mark International Nurses Day.
“I joined the care team at Tˆy Hafan as a paediatric palliative care nurse recently,” says Meg, “but I have been coming to Tˆy Hafan since I was eight. “My brother Greg has Downs Syndrome as well as pulmonary hypertension and cardiac disease. He started to come to Tˆy Hafan when he was 15, and my other brother Tom and I also became involved then too.
“I loved it right from the start. There’s always been such a lovely team here and when I was younger I would ‘help’ the nurses – basically I would copy whatever the nurses were doing. “Along with my parents and my other brother Tom, I have done a lot of caring for Greg. So it felt like a natural choice for me to go on and study paediatric nursing at Swansea University. I then worked at Noah’s Ark Children’s Hospital for a while, which was amazing. “But I decided to come into palliative care nursing at Tˆy Hafan because I think it’s just so special. It’s so much more than what people may think. “Greg has traits of autism so it’s really important that he has, wherever possible, the same people looking after him. And he gets that here at Tˆy Hafan. The atmosphere here is always so lovely. “Even when Greg left Tˆy Hafan because he had outgrown the support it offers, I still had lot of support through the Tˆy Hafan Super Sibs group. “Now, 15 years after I first came here as a child, I am a nurse working at Tˆy Hafan. It’s nice but it still feels a bit surreal. I wake up and then I think ‘Oh yeah, I’m going to work at Tˆy Hafan!’ It’s just so amazing!”
