![Our Lady's Hospice, Blackrock Building Entrance](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/20/Our_Lady%27s_Hospice%2C_Blackrock_Building_Entrance.JPG)
Our Lady's Hospice & Care Services is a
hospice
Hospice care is a type of health care that focuses on the palliation of a terminally ill patient's pain and symptoms and attending to their emotional and spiritual needs at the end of life. Hospice care prioritizes comfort and quality of life by ...
and health care provider with two locations: one at
Harold's Cross, Dublin and a satellite facility at
Blackrock, County Dublin
Blackrock () is a suburb of Dublin, Ireland, northwest of Dún Laoghaire.
Location and access
Blackrock covers a large but not precisely defined area, rising from sea level on the coast to at White's Cross on the N11 national primary road. ...
in
Ireland
Ireland ( ; ga, Éire ; Ulster Scots dialect, Ulster-Scots: ) is an island in the Atlantic Ocean, North Atlantic Ocean, in Northwestern Europe, north-western Europe. It is separated from Great Britain to its east by the North Channel (Grea ...
. It provides specialist care for people with a range of needs from rehabilitation to end of life care.
["Our Heritage", Our Lady's Hospice & Care Services]
/ref>
History
When the motherhouse of the Religious Sisters of Charity The Religious Sisters of Charity or Irish Sisters of Charity is a Roman Catholic religious institute founded by Mary Aikenhead in Ireland on 15 January 1815. Its motto is ('The love Christ urges us on'; ).
The institute has its headquarters in Dub ...
moved from "Our Lady's Mount" in Harold's Cross to Mount St. Anne's in Milltown in 1879, the sisters opened Our Lady's Hospice at Harold's Cross, pioneering the modern hospice movement. The congregation was founded by Mary Aikenhead in 1815. By 1880, Our Lady's Hospice had a capacity of forty beds,[ and was overseen, expanded and improved by the first sister superior of the Hospice, Anna Gaynor.] Later, Catherine Cummins, or Mother Polycarp, over saw further expansion of the accommodation.
Around the time the hospice was founded n 1879, the incidence of TB, typhoid, and measles in Dublin was very high. By 1889 it was claimed that Dublin's death rate was topped only by Calcutta. Dublin's high mortality rates at the time were attributable in part to very sick rural people moving to Dublin in search of care, and thus contributing to Dublin's mortality rate.High mortality rate blamed on extreme cold, Irish Times, 4 February 1879
/ref> Research by Thomas Wrigley Grimsham in the early 1880s showed that the instance of TB in Ireland was rising compared to the rest of the UK where it was falling. He was able to show that from the 1860s to the 1880s there was a steady increase in the number of deaths of TB and it was also more prevalent in urban areas.
References
Further reading
* Katherine Butler / Sisters of Charity (1980) We help them home: the story of Our Lady's Hospice, Harold's Cross, Dublin, 1879–1979
* T. M. Healy (2004) 125 years of caring in Dublin: Our Lady's Hospice, Harolds Cross 1879-2004
Multitext Project in Irish History, University College Cork
External links
*
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Hospices
Organisations based in Dublin (city)
Harolds Cross
Medical and health organisations based in the Republic of Ireland