THE East Lancashire Hospice has come of age. This year it celebrates its 21st birthday. IAN SINGLETON visited the Park Lee Road facility in Blackburn to see just how far it has come since 1984. . .

HOSPICES are typically thought to be grim places where people go to die.

But visit the East Lancashire Hospice and you come out feeling uplifted, not depressed.

Rather than a place of sickness and death, the hospice is infused with optimism and hope.

This is exemplified most by the patients whose demeanour is positive and grateful, rather than negative and bitter which they could easily be.

But most of all, the hospice is uplifting because it is built on people's generosity, be it the charitable donations which bring in £600,000 of the £720,000 annual running costs, or the 150 volunteers who give up hours of their time each week. And since the facility opened 21 years ago this amazing kindness has meant that the lives of the 13,371 patients who have passed through the doors have been made better.

Dr Merton Seigleman launched the hospice in 1984 after members of the public donated £600,000.

When it was launched the hospice just had beds for 10 inpatients.

Today, while the number of beds has remained the same, the number of services it offers have expanded greatly to include catering for outpatients and offering rehabilitation and complementary therapies.

These new services were made possible by the £2.2million appeal for a new building. It was opened in January 2002.

People sent to the hospice are not just those with terminal cancer. Outpatients can be any form of cancer sufferers.

They visit for an hour a week to receive help such as counselling, aromatherapy massages, reflexology, reiki, physiotherapy and even hypnotherapy.

Jack Bower, 74, of Milnshaw Gardens, Accrington, has been visiting the hospice, which has 60 paid-for staff, since September while he learns to cope with his inoperable lung cancer.

He said: "The hospice gives you your confidence back. They say when you are told you have lung cancer you just deflate, but in here they build you up again."

Irene Sutton, 58, of Millside Avenue, Darwen, has been an inpatient since Christmas Day as she receives round-the-clock care for her cancer.

It is the second time she has been in and she intends to go home once she is fit enough. She said: "It is beautiful here. You come in here and feel safe. People are frightened of hospices, but they shouldn't be.

"The kindness I have experienced in here has been amazing."

Volunteer Freda Vallet, 70, of Blackburn, has given several hours a week for 14 years to be with inpatients or visit cancer suffers in their home so their carers can have a break. She said: "It is so rewarding. Whatever I have given, I have received a thousand times back."

Dr Seigleman, 81, who retired in 1993, returned to the hospice yesterday and said: "I am very proud. It has been evolving for the better."