Someone at the end of the phone

When Phillip Hayes left the inpatient unit at Evora Hospice last year, the building did not stop looking after him. A nurse could still come to the house after ten.

He was 49. He spent a week in one of the twelve single rooms at St John’s House, on Courtney Hill in Newry, then went home, which is what he had asked for. The hospice’s own page for that unit says people often come in for pain or nausea and, once that is steadier, go home again. Some people choose to die there. Phillip did not. He died at home on 7 September 2025, with his wife Joanne and their sons, Jack and Ben.

Joanne spoke to Columba O’Hare for Newry.ie this month. “Everything was explained in a way we could understand, and no request was ever too much. There was such warmth and kindness in every interaction. Just knowing there was someone at the end of the phone made such a difference. Evora Hospice was there for Phillip, but they have also continued to be there for all of us.”

When he came home she was introduced to Out of Hours Nursing at Home. Nurses from the local community visit between 10pm and 8am, every night of the year, for people in the BT35 postcode and the Newry city area. They manage symptoms. They also sit with the people who are awake in the house. The service began as a cancer-only pilot. The hospice later opened it to other palliative conditions and now pays for it itself.

On the Midnight Memory Walk page, Evora prices three hours of that nighttime nursing at £91.15 - a useful fundraising illustration.

Since he die, Joanne has been to the hospice’s Bereavement Journey group. Ben has been to Family Night: pizza and games on the last Thursday of the month, for families where a parent has died. You do not have to have used the inpatient unit to ask. The offer is for people in the Southern Trust area bereaved after a palliative illness.

On Saturday 26 September, at eleven at night, Joanne will walk six kilometres from St Colman’s College on the Armagh Road. It is the eighteenth year of the walk. Each person gets a memory bib with a name on it. There is a Memory Wall for dedications. The Choir Studio Newry will sing the Hospice Song, which they have recorded for as long as the walk has existed. McKeevers Chemists pay to put the night on.

Adults register for £30; anyone under sixteen is £10 and has to walk with an adult. The early-bird £25 has ended. The hospice suggests another £80 in sponsorship. Last year’s event, it says, paid for more than 47 hours of care. If you cannot be in Newry that night, they will post a lantern and a pack so you can walk the distance in your own time.

Evora, which was Southern Area Hospice until 2025, has been in St John’s House since 1989, after the maternity unit there closed. It cares for almost a thousand patients a year, free at the point of care, from Kilkeel to Ballygawley: at home, or in the inpatient unit. More than 80 per cent of what it takes in goes to that work, on its own figures, with more than 250 volunteers around the paid staff.

This year it will cost about £6 million to run. The hospice says it has to find £4 million of that itself: 65 per cent of its income, or £460 every hour by its own sums. Joanne told O’Hare she is walking to recognise the care that surrounded him, and the support that did not stop.