TODAY marks the opening of a new era for St Richard's Hospice.

After twenty years of helping people in South Worcestershire suffering from cancer and other life-threatening illnesses, an appeal is launched to fund a purpose-built residential hospice on a green-field site at Wildwood Way, Worcester.

It's a scheme showing great foresight.

The new hospice will offer services and care that it cannot, for logistical reasons, give at present - limited as it is by the building it occupies in Rose Hill. It is, essentially, a day care service.

What will be available in the planned state-of-the-art building is full, residential palliative care.

Readers will have read the fullest details of the St Richard's Hospice dream in the special supplement, published in the Evening News.

It reinforced the long-held view that this is exactly what is needed and it's needed as soon as possible.

What is missing at present is not the will to get the job done, but the cash to do it.

And this is where the people of South Worcestershire come in.

The community has a well-earnt reputation for a willingness to put its hand into its pocket when a great need arises.

Well, now is one of those times.

The Worecster Evening News is wholeheartedly behind this great initiative and we urge the public to support the Building Beds Together appeal.

Let's make the St Richard's dream become a reality.