Katharine House receives government grant to improve hospice facilities 

9 March 2026

As part of the government’s £125m of funding for hospices across England, Katharine House Hospice will be receiving £147,000 for the 2025-26 financial year. The funding is to cover capital costs to make improvements to the hospice’s physical environment to benefit patients and investments in digital technology. 

The grant will help Katharine House to improve some of the facilities at the hospice in Banbury, including updating the windows and doors in the ten-bed Inpatient Unit and purchasing a new bladder scanner, which will bring increased comfort and ensure that patients don’t have to be referred to the Horton for this scan. The hospice will also obtain two more ‘cuddle beds’, a specially adapted bed that allows family members to lie side by side – something that isn’t possible with a traditional nursing bed. As well as medical equipment, the grant will enable the hospice to upgrade their IT equipment and replace a 12-year-old oven with a new, more efficient model.   

Emma Radley, CEO of Katharine House Hospice said, “We are hugely grateful to the Department of Health & Social Care and Hospice UK for delivering this capital grant, which will help us to improve our site for the patients that come to our Inpatient Unit, but we must not lose the sight of the fact that it does not help us with the ever increasing everyday costs of delivering our care. Our care is delivered by people, not equipment, and their costs cannot be covered with this funding.  

“Additionally, only a fraction of the people we support each year are cared for in our Inpatient Unit, so many more are helped in their homes and in our outpatient services.  To keep these services going, we must really work to maximise our income generation. Each year we are grateful to receive some statutory funding, but we still need to raise around 60% of our core costs from fundraising and our charity shops to enable us to continue to provide our specialist, palliative care for free, both at the hospice and out in the community.  

“It costs more than £5.9m each year to run every aspect of Katharine House and so we rely on the generosity of our local community who donate, buy from our shops, fundraise and leave gifts in their wills to enable us to continue to provide this vital care.” 

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