A CHARITY that provides free care to seriously ill people in Dorset has been hit by the credit crunch and could face a deficit of almost £1 million next year.

Falling investment income and fewer donations to the Weldmar Hospicecare Trust have made setting the budget for 2009/10 ‘very tricky’, the chief executive has said.

Alison Ryan, chief executive of the trust, said: “Doing everything we would like to do would mean digging very deep into our savings.”

Mrs Ryan said the charity could manage on its reserves for the time being.

But she added that it ‘could not go on with deficits, which could be the best part of £1 million, when we do not know how long the recession is going to last’.

She added: “It’s always a struggle but the economic climate really affects us.

“All our income streams have been threatened at the moment, from legacies – where people leave the trust actual houses or a share of their house in their wills – to individual donations and interest on investments.

“We depend on legacies hugely and if property prices drop, the legacies drop.

“If people aren’t buying new clothes then they don’t give us their old ones for our charity shops.

“We get hit every way potentially.”

Mrs Ryan said the charity will raise over £5.6 million in 2008/09 but would need to raise well over £6 million next year to provide the same services.

The extra £400,000 would have to be funded by donations from the public and ‘with falling income this is a great worry’, Mrs Ryan said.

She added: “We will have some difficult decisions to make when we set the budget.

“In addition, the charity planned to invest £500,000 of its reserves in service improvement but maintaining the quality of current services is more important than making improvements.”

Only 30 per cent of the costs of the trust’s services comes from the NHS.

Mrs Ryan said: “The other 70 per cent has to come from the good people of Dorset and if they’re having to count the pennies then they’re going to think twice before giving to us.”

Mrs Ryan believes the NHS should fund palliative care equally across the county, rather than the current situation whereby East Dorset has full NHS funding, while North, South and West Dorset depend on charitable donations.

She said in the past six months this discrepancy had become clear to the Primary Care Trust (PCT) and she was ‘hopeful’ that they could work in partnership ‘to see what we should do about this.’ Mrs Ryan said: “Once you get past Wool and into East Dorset – people get their services 100 per cent paid for by the NHS, while only 30 per cent is paid for here. It’s very strange.”

Mrs Ryan said it was the result of ‘history’ – after the trust began providing palliative care it became a widespread demand – which then had to be NHS funded.

She said: “Everyone has a right to a good death and they realised they would have to provide palliative care for the east of the county, which was further than we could go.

“So they had to put their hands in their pockets and now the tax payer pays for it over there.

“The tax payer pays over here too but they also have to give their clothes to our charity shops and attend our premieres to help raise the money.”