Our mission

To buy what the ward could not, and to sit with the patient until the buying has been done.

The Friends’ charitable object is the same one written down in 1968: to purchase medical equipment and provide benefits to patients in Yeovil Hospital. This page explains how that small sentence becomes a year’s work, and names — plainly — the things we are not able to do.

A volunteer’s hands tying a Friends’ cream-and-gold paper label to the handle of a newly delivered ward monitor in a Yeovil District Hospital corridor. — Labelling a new cardiac monitor on Ward 8B · January 2026.

Theory of change

Three steps, repeated for fifty-eight years.

It is not complicated. We raise from neighbours and patients, we ask the wards what they need, and we deliver — slowly, and with the buying receipts attached to the back of every annual report.

01 · We raise

From the shop, the café, the trolley, and the post.

The Friends’ Café and shop on Level 2 raise the majority. The remainder comes from donations, legacies, the Anniversary Supper, and the Spring Walk. Every penny is recorded against a named appeal.

02 · We agree

What the ward needs that the NHS budget cannot reach.

Each summer the trustees meet with the medical director, the matron and the ward sisters. We agree a list, in writing, of equipment and comforts that will be funded in the coming year. The list is published in the annual report.

03 · We deliver

Equipment named in the report, comforts on the bed.

Equipment is bought, labelled and installed. Comforts are stocked on the trolley and handed out by name. At the end of the year, every line is reconciled and the receipt is filed with the trustees’ minutes.

Our values

Five quiet ideas, written down once and read out every September.

01 · Equipment, not influence

We are not a campaigning charity.

We do not lobby, write op-eds, or take sides in NHS reorganisation debates. Our work begins with a clinical request and ends with a piece of equipment on a ward. If you want a charity that fights, support one. If you want one that funds, we are here.

02 · Comforts count

Small things on the longest days.

A radio on day five of an admission is the difference between dignified and not. We have never apologised for funding small comforts.

03 · Local first

Yeovil and the villages within thirty miles.

Our donors are our neighbours and our patients are our donors. We do not run national appeals. We set up the gazebo at the Stoke fete and we know the postcodes on our donor list by sight.

04 · Plain accounts

Audited, published, plainly explained.

Each year we publish our accounts in full and write a short letter explaining where the surplus went and what we got wrong. Members vote at the September AGM.

05 · Fellowship

The charity is the volunteers.

The Wednesday shop rota is the longest-running social club in the building. We do not pretend that volunteering is purely altruistic — it is also lunch, gossip, and a reason to wear a coat in February.

Things we cannot do

An honest paragraph, written by the chair.

There are several things we are sometimes asked to do that we are not able to do, and we would rather you knew now than at the point of disappointment. We cannot fund medication for individual patients, NHS staff salaries, or out-of-hospital social care. We do not pay for transport home after discharge, and we cannot help with care-home fees — although we will, every time, take the call and point you to a kinder organisation than ourselves. In 2019 we ran a small pilot of a discharge-grant programme funded from the legacy of a Stoke-Sub-Hamdon donor; we closed it eighteen months later, quietly, because the demand was so much larger than the legacy that we were unable to make decisions we could explain to other applicants without distress. We hold the closure in our memory and re-read the file every winter to remind ourselves what the limits of a small charity look like.

The chair’s desk in the Stoke-Sub-Hamdon office — a manilla folder labelled ‘DISCHARGE GRANT PILOT 2019’, a half-empty mug, a hand-written reflection on a foolscap pad. — The chair’s file on the closed pilot, kept in the Stoke-Sub-Hamdon office and read every winter.

We are also a small charity by hospital-charity standards. Our annual charitable expenditure is around £473,000 — enough for a meaningful list of monitors, scanners, beds, and comforts, but not enough to fund a new wing or a multi-year research programme. We are very careful about what we promise. If we are asked to lead an appeal that we know we cannot finish in the timescale, we will say so, and recommend a larger charity instead.

We will never raise money quickly. We will always raise it for something the ward sister has already named. Roger Walkington · Chair’s letter, 2024 annual report

Read on

If our mission rings true, see the year’s programmes.

Six small enterprises, one steady purpose — each one funded, named, and reported on each spring.

Programmes Annual reports