It is Hospice Care Week, and as hospice services are being cut across the country due to a lack of Government funding patients facing life-limiting diseases are experiencing this most difficult time in their lives with fewer services available to support them.
Hospice Care Week 6-12th October 2025
Helen Holland has spent the last 12 years of her nearly 30-year career as a Chartered Physiotherapist working with patients who are facing such difficulties, providing quality treatment in a variety of ways. Having recently been made redundant from a local hospice, she is now keen to bring this knowledge and expertise to the Fit2Go physiotherapy-led practice in West Bridgford and East Leake.
Hospice services are being cut across the country due to a lack of funding (often hospices are only partly funded by the NHS), along with reduced services within the NHS, patients are facing life limiting conditions like cancer, MND and respiratory diseases
Helen says, “It is a real sadness to me that these services, locally and across the country, are being cut back. I know first-hand, only too well, that patients who are facing this time in their lives desperately need compassion and understanding, along with practical help to minimise their symptoms and maximise their quality of life.
“Without this vital input, patients and their families aren’t given the chance to properly plan and focus on what is important and how best to achieve this, without the specialist help that they desperately need. This is why I am so passionate about setting up this service locally—to provide advice and treatment options to those who really need it, and for whom there is no provision.”
Fit2Go, which has been based in West Bridgford since 2023 and in East Leake since last summer, is expanding its services to other areas of therapeutic intervention. As part of this expansion, Helen will be able to provide acupuncture, which is proven to help with a myriad distressing symptoms such as pain, anxiety, and unwanted symptoms caused by chemotherapy, which is sometimes denied to those with cancer.
In addition to this, gentle exercise programmes can be recommended for those who have been hospitalised for a time and may be deconditioned, along with those struggling with breathlessness as a result of a long-term lung or heart condition.
Patients diagnosed with MND and other neurological conditions, such as Parkinson’s disease, can benefit from specialist knowledge too. This is why Helen is offering free telephone consultations to all her patients initially. She offers this as part of her wish to fully understand and discuss what the patient’s goal is and how she can tailor their treatment plan in a holistic way, either in the clinic in person, virtually, or through home visits.
As part of Hospice Care Week, Helen is also offering a free one-hour scar therapy treatment slot to four or five patients who get in touch with her in October and who have undergone surgery to help them recover from a cancer diagnosis—for example, breast cancer surgery. The only proviso Helen is requesting is that “anyone receiving a free treatment will send a donation of whatever they can spare to their local hospice, in order that we keep these amazing places of support and hope for patients and their families for as long as possible, in light of difficult decisions being made up and down the country around cutbacks to vital services.”
For further information, please email: Helen@fit2goclinic.co.uk or call 01509 856 274 or 0115 773 7560.
