I’m doing one of my Polish visits and have the chance to see a Wroclaw hospice (I have not correctly rendered the non-English alphabet of this city – you pronounce it vrotslav.

In the grounds of a Catholic hospital in suburban Wroclaw, in a treed garden (but this week heavily covered in snow), it is a two-storey stand-alone building, which has just had a new addition, with 16 beds in two-bed rooms. A bit hospital-like, and in this way it reminds me of a rather similar place I saw in Estonia a couple of years ago. This organisation, a off-shoot of a Catholic order of monks, does not have a home care service, another part of the city does, but it is unconnected with the in-patient unit.

Talk of people wanting the fact that they are in a hospice and are considered to be dying concealed from relatives.

I am there with some staff from the local social work college, one of whose students did a placement at St Christopher’s and is now doing a placement trying to establish a volunteer programme in the Wroclaw hospice. It has a mainly medical-nursing focus, although the part-time psychologist mainly has a counselling role, and there are no social workers.