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 b ...

and health care provider with three locations: one at Harold's Cross, Dublin and satellite facilities at

Blackrock, County Dublin Blackrock () is an affluent suburb of Dublin, Ireland, northwest of Dún Laoghaire. It is named after the local geological rock formation to be found in the area of Blackrock Park. In the late 18th century, the Blackrock Road was a common place ...

and Magheramore,

County Wicklow County Wicklow ( ; ) is a Counties of Ireland, county in Republic of Ireland, Ireland. The last of the traditional 32 counties, having been formed as late as 1606 in Ireland, 1606, it is part of the Eastern and Midland Region and the Provinces ...

Ireland Ireland (, ; ; Ulster Scots dialect, Ulster-Scots: ) is an island in the North Atlantic Ocean, in Northwestern Europe. Geopolitically, the island is divided between the Republic of Ireland (officially Names of the Irish state, named Irelan ...

. 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
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History

When the motherhouse of the Religious Sisters of Charity 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, oversaw further expansion of the accommodation. Around the time the hospice was founded in 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.

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{{authority control Hospices Organisations based in Dublin (city) Harold's Cross Medical and health organisations based in the Republic of Ireland

History

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