A NEW chaplain will help to meet the spiritual needs of patients at The Rowans Hospice in Hampshire.

Lance Blake and the Rev Carol Gully in the hospice chapel

 
The Rev Carol Gully, who has just finished working as a chaplain at the Queen Alexandra Hospital in Portsmouth, will take over from Lance Blake after his retirement on Tuesday (April 30).
 
Lance, who has been chaplain at The Rowans Hospice for 14 years, is retiring to the hermitage he has created with his wife Sue in Lincolnshire. The hermitage, in the heart of the Fenland countryside is a place of simple prayer but also has accommodation for guests to stay.
 
Carol joined the team at The Rowans Hospice annual memorial service in Portsmouth Cathedral on Sunday (April 21). She is now working alongside Lance until he steps down at the end of the month.
 
The chaplain’s role involves providing spiritual and pastoral care to patients of all faiths and none and their families, both in the hospice and in their own homes. A small chapel provides a quiet space and hosts informal services, and the chaplain can also offer Communion and prayer at patients’ beds.
 
“I am really excited about this new role,” said Carol. “I also feel daunted, but the staff have made me incredibly welcome. To join the team at the cathedral service was a real privilege. It was a packed service and you could sense the emotion, as everyone there had been through a similar sense of bereavement and community.
 
“I enjoyed being a hospital chaplain, but there is inevitably something more clinical about a hospital setting. At The Rowans Hospice, the aesthetics are different – there is carpet on the floor, you are surrounded by God’s beautiful creation and hear the water fountain.
 
“The Rowans Hospice has been described as a family, and I think you see that sense of community when you join the team.”
 
Carol will also continue in her role as assistant curate at St Cuthbert’s Church, Copnor, leading worship and preaching. Before coming to Portsmouth in 2010, she had also worked as a member of the chaplaincy team at the Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust, which serves an area north of Manchester. Her husband Paul is rector of St Andrew’s Church and Church of the Resurrection, Farlington.
 
Ruth White, chief executive of The Rowans Hospice, said: “It’s a wonderful opportunity for Carol to build on the spiritual care legacy she has inherited. We are planning a new initiative to extend our facilities with an adjacent building where we can provide therapies and care to enhance the quality of life for people living within our community who would benefit from hospice care as they approach the end of their life.
 
“We very much welcome Carol’s input to further our holistic and multi-faith approach to care in supporting the spiritual needs of all those who are part of our Hospice community.”
 
Lance Blake started his chaplaincy career as a Franciscan friar in Birmingham, where he trained at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital. He joined the naval chaplaincy at the Royal Hospital Haslar in Gosport, supporting the forces engaged in the Kosovo conflicts and the fall-out from the Gulf and Falklands wars.
 
His interest in post-traumatic stress disorder prompted him to join St James Hospital in Portsmouth as their co-ordinating mental health chaplain. And then he joined The Rowans Hospice in 1999.
 
“It has been a huge and humbling privilege to work at the hospice,” he said. “Although it deals with the complexities of end of life care, it is paradoxically a very healing place. If you are told you have a terminal illness, it brings the things that really matter into focus. The Rowans Hospice is a place where patients, families and their chaplain learn together about what matters really quickly.
 
“The Hospice has formed an important part of my life, for which I am grateful, and now my journey continues in a new place. For me, being active and being contemplative are both vital, and having been very active, I’ll enjoy the chance for some contemplation.”
 
For details about Lance’s new hermitage, see www.fenlandhermitage.co.uk. For more details about The Rowans Hospice, see www.rowanshospice.co.uk