Nottinghamshire funeral firm has donated £780,000 in 20 years to Nottingham Hospitals Charity
An award-winning family funeral directors has helped Nottingham Hospitals Charity to improve palliative care services in the city thanks to facilitating £782,000 in donations made at its funerals.
As the charity celebrates a monumental 20 years, AW Lymn has helped facilitate the huge sum which the charity said has contributed to enhancing care and facilities in over 90 different areas across the four hospitals it serves – with a high proportion of donations going towards Hayward House, the specialist palliative care unit at the City Hospital.
Nigel Gregory, chief executive at the charity, said: “As we celebrate our 20th year of being at the heart of care across Nottingham’s NHS hospitals, we are grateful to AW Lymn who really have been at the heart of what we do.
"They have supported us since the beginning, not only through facilitating donations made at funerals, but by staff getting actively involved in fundraising for our charity as well.
"We are incredibly appreciative of their ongoing support, and the difference they have enabled us to make for patients, families, and staff here at Nottingham’s NHS hospitals.”
AW Lymn was established in Nottingham in 1907 and has grown to become one of the UK’s largest independent funeral directors, operating 27 branches across the region including in Mansfield, Sutton, Hucknall, Bulwell, Rainworth, Mansfield Woodhouse, Retford and Ollerton.
The donations it has facilitated have supported patients and their loved ones at Hayward House by providing complementary therapy services, bereavement support and counselling, art therapy, and enhancements to the patient environment including an accessible garden area, family room, quiet room and counselling rooms, for the more than 1,000 patients it serves a year with life-limiting illnesses.
The funeral directors offers those organising a service the option of asking attendees to make a donation to a charity of their choice, instead of buying flowers, and more than 8,400 donations have been facilitated to the charity in this way.
This is just one of the options that allows those who chose AW Lymn to tailor a funeral to meet their needs.
Nigel Lymn Rose, AW Lymn chairman, said: “We are truly humbled by the number of donations we have been able to facilitate over the last 20 years.
"It has been a key part of our service at AW Lymn for many years and reflects the very ethos of why we do what we do.
“The fact that we can see the tangible difference it has made across Nottingham is testament not only to the charity’s work, but to those families organising a funeral through us who have chosen to remember their loved ones in such a thoughtful and special way.
"We look forward to celebrating all that has been achieved as the charity marks two outstanding decades of truly vital support in our city and county for those who need it most.”
As well as facilitating funeral donations, the AW Lymn team has carried out its own fundraising for the charity over the years through activities like the Robin Hood Half-Marathon, the Big QMC Abseil and helping to collect Christmas trees as part of the charity’s Christmas Tree Recycling scheme.