Bialystok

The Bialystok hospice started out with a group of volunteers providing respite care, home visits and medical support in 1987. In 1989 the local council gave the hospice a dilapidated residential house. This was renovated by volunteers to provide the first residential hospice in Poland, with five beds. That hospice is used to this day.

"Such a small house, but how many patients and their families have found comfort within its walls," were the words of Jan Kondzior, the vice-president of the charity that runs the hospice.

A second building, scheduled for demolition was rebuilt and equipped by volunteers and opened in 1992. It provided 30 beds and training facilities. Despite this extra space, in 2010 the hospice had a waiting list of around 200 people. Half would never make it to the hospice.

The hospice started construction of an extension, to provide additional beds so that no one had to be turned away. When Cycle Poland visited in June 2010, construction was under way, but funds were desperately needed to complete and equip the building.

In April 2013, after more than four years of hard work and constantly reminding people that in a city as big as Bialystok there are not enough beds for the dying and that everyone might be building for themselves, or their family, the project was complete. The new building was formally opened.

Patients now have much better facilities, but above all there are more beds. The hospice can now accommodate 39 patients.

The Alina Foundation has provided:

• in 2010, an oxygen concentrator and a suction pump; and
• in  2015, an oxygen concentrator and pulse oximeter.
• in 2017, an oxygen concentrator, a pulse oximeter and two suction catheters

See hospice webpage:  www.hospicjum.bialystok.pl

The first hospice building, still in use 26 years later

Our cyclists speak to Jan Kondzior in 2010, during construction of the new extension.

The completed new extension in 2013