About The Hospice

Otago Community Hospice is a centre of excellence providing the highest quality specialist palliative care and support to patients and their families throughout Otago.

The Hospice has grown and matured in response to its community.  A forward-thinking, community-minded group of Dunedin people identified a need for a hospice unit 30 years ago.  It has evolved from a small cottage industry caring for a handful of patients into a sizable, professional essential service caring for more than 870 people and their families each year.  The Hospice has developed into a highly adaptive service, continuously striving to improve our community outreach, our inpatient service and our teams’ knowledge as well as striving to increase industry knowledge in our speciality area.

Our vision is to support people with terminal illness to live and die well.  

Otago Community Hospice enables patients to live their lives as fully as possible.  We work in partnership with our community, offering education, support, care and advice to family, whānau, carers and health and social service professionals, through a patient’s illness and following death.

We support our patients wherever they want to be – that may be in their home, in a residential care home setting or, if their needs are complex, within our inpatient unit. Where we can, we aim to keep people in their environment, symptom-free, for as long as possible.

Otago Community Hospice is a euthanasia-free service, therefore does not provide any form of assisted dying. However, our palliative care team will continue to provide expert palliative care to patients, whatever choices they make at the end of life.

All Otago Community Hospice services are provided free of charge. We are supported by the newly formed Te Whatu Ora with contracts that contribute 56% of our operating costs. The rest of the cost of running the Hospice falls to fundraising - this year our target is $5 million.

Our reliance on fundraising keeps us sharp. We have to ensure we are using public dollars in the most effective and responsible way possible. Please help us reach our target and find out how you can support us.