Bury Hospice is dear to us all.

If you are donating this Christmas, our hospice is well worth your generous support.

Successive efforts to fundraiser, save and sustain it, resonate across our town.

We’re proud of the commitment and dedication of its staff and army of volunteers who care for and support patients and their families as the life of a loved one ends.

It is under impressive new leadership with a renewed fundraising impetus.

Hospices are vital community social care assets but they rely on our kind donations even in these difficult times.

Though Christmas is a time for giving, according to research by the Movement for Good, a third of people in the UK are likely to cut down on charity donations because of the cost of living.

Visiting a Bury Hospice shop last weekend, I was told sales were up, but donations of items had slowed as people kept hold of their items for longer or donated them elsewhere.

There is increased competition from food, clothes and baby-banks in our borough.

I was proud to serve as chair of the All Party Group for Hospice Care in Parliament.

Each hospice experiences the same stop-starts, ups and downs with funding.

To protect against this, they believe they can play a stronger role in our social care system. This has my full support.

This is a personal passion for me and a tale of what might have been for my own family.

In 2011, after an aggressive six months since the diagnosis ambushed her and us all, my wife’s brilliant mum, Liz, lost her life to cancer. There was just time to have the last loving conversations with her most-loved.

Including her correctly predicting that her next grandchild, would be a boy. She was right.

When the time came, I stood consoling my heavily pregnant wife and our family in a busy ward corridor at Fairfield during visiting hours, with Liz having died just moments before.

On reflection, following prognosis, treatment should have focused on the quality of life left for Liz and a good death.

A hospice’s specialist care can include confident prescribing for pain control, Christie-cancer treatment, symptom relief, skilled nursing, counselling, complementary therapies, spiritual care, art or music therapy, physiotherapy, reminiscence, beauty treatments, bereavement support, hospice at home and day care.

Add to this, the quality and capacity in a system that is crying out for more and onward plans for patients.

The crisis in social care continues to go un-answered by the government’s wasted 12 years.

Their boasts of having solved it are hollow. We believe in better.

A life’s last moments can be very different with a social care service readily involving and enabling Hospices for that final lap, for the many.

I urge the wider leadership across our borough to place our hospice at the heart of social care and end of life plans for more loved ones in Bury.

As for what is at stake? I cannot put it any better than the late Rt Hon Tessa Jowell put it before she died when she said: "What gives a life meaning is not only how it is lived but how it draws to a close."

To donate to Bury Hospice visit buryhospice.org.uk/donate.

James Frith is the Labour Candidate for the general election. He served as MP for Bury North between 2017-19 and hopes to again. He Tweets @JamesFrith