AS the Lancashire Telegraph spearheads a fundraising campaign to raise £125,000 for a new roof for East Lancashire Hospice, we look at the 27-year history of the facility.

WHEN the incredible story of East Lancashire Hospice is told, one man's name stands out amongst all others.

And for Dr Merton Seigleman, founding the hospice was the realisation of a lifelong ambition.

He was just a 16-year-old boy when he watched his mother die in pain from a vicious cancer in 1939.

Now 87, he said: “My mother was diagnosed with cancer of the breast. She was 43.

“It was inoperable and she came home to die. I watched her die in agony for weeks.

“When you’re 16 that makes a lasting impression on you.”

Dr Seigleman, from Salford, qualified as a doctor in 1953, and vowed to become a consultant anaesthetist, administering aesthetics and providing pain relief.

“There was no such thing as hospices back then.

“I got a scholarship to go to the USA, where they had just started a pain relief study.

“Still at that time it was provided on an ad-hoc basis by individual consultants, and it was for people with back aches and shoulder aches, not cancer patients.

“I learned how to do nerve blocks, give injections, and ease pain, and we realised you could give people in pain far higher amounts of drugs than we had before.”

Dr Seigleman was appointed as a consultant at Blackburn Infirmary in 1961.

He continued studying pain relief and came across the work of Dame Cicely Saunders, who opened the first purpose-built hospice, St Christopher’s in London, in 1967.

“They were treating people with malignant pain and I realised that was what I wanted to do, having seen what my mother went through.

“Dame Cicely was a wonderful woman. She chose the word hospice because the original hospices were resting places for travellers.

“She took the view that hospices would be a resting place for people ready to go to the next stage in their lives, travelling from this world to the next.”

A devout Jew, Dr Seigleman lectured in anaesthesia in Israel in 1971, and practised pain relief on the battlefields of the Yom Kippur War.

Another experience in the 1970s shaped his plans.

“We had a young lady in one of the wards. She had agonising problems with advanced cancer, but she was completely relieved of pain and I went home for the weekend.

“When I went back on Monday all her pain had come back, because they had been too busy to give her the drugs on time.

“Eventually I decided there had to be a specialist unit in East Lancashire because general wards were busy and couldn’t cope with these patients.”

In 1981 Dr Seigleman began campaigning for a hospice.

“There was a lot of opposition to it. Some consultants felt it would be money wasted and some GPs thought they knew best about pain relief.”

Undeterred, he spoke to Ian Woolley, former hospitals trust chairman, who called a public meeting.

It was agreed that if the East Lancashire public could fund a hospice building, the NHS would staff it and meet its running costs.

A fundraising committee was set up, and pockets of fundraising groups worked tirelessly, raising a staggering £700,000 for the project.

On May 12, 1983, Dr Siegleman laid the foundation stone for the new, purpose built, 10-bed in-patient unit.

And on June 21, 1984 the East Lancashire Hospice first opened its doors, with Dr Seigleman at the helm.

He aimed to admit not only patients to the hospice, but also their relatives, creating a support network including a social worker, a chaplain, a hairdresser and facilities for relatives to stay overnight.

“People were scared the hospice was a place where they were going to die. What we did was build a first class hotel.

“Many people did die in the hospice, but many people got the pain relief they needed and went home, and we would go visit them. This was years before MacMillan Nurses.

“We couldn’t stop them dying, but we could make sure that what time they had left was good quality time.”

Dr Seigleman worked long hours to make the hospice a success, splitting his day between Blackburn Infirmary and the unit, and treating more patients at the hospice after work.

He officially retired as a hospital anaesthetist in 1988, but stayed working on nominal pay, before finally retiring at the age of 70 in 1993.

“The impression has been given that I was a one-man-band. I was the only doctor, but without the dedicated nurses, without many volunteers, it would never have got off the ground.

“I would have done it for free but they had to pay me according to health authority rules. So they paid me for one session a week and I did it full time.

“I did it because it was a labour of love. I didn’t consider it work. I had set my heart on it.”

At the age of 74 Dr Seigleman gained a history degree and at 82, a social sciences degree.

He received an MBE for services to the hospice movement in 1985, and the hospice remains his crowning achievement.

“There is nothing more rewarding than to see a patient in agony one day and then be able to talk to them the next day.

“I consider myself to be one of the fortunate people in this world because I had an ambition which I realised, and not many people can say that.”