For Mirna Haddow and many other patients in the undulating Valleys of South Wales, Cheryll Durham is a godsend.

The 58-year-old hospice nurse cared for Mrs Haddow, 67, throughout a long fight with cancer and its aftermath, when all other doctors and health services had let her down.

“I had a sucessful operation to remove a tumour from my bowel but did not recover very well at all,” Mrs Haddow said when The Times visited her at her home in Beaufort, Gwent, last month. “I was in agony and could not eat anything, but the oncologists did not know what was wrong. The attitude of the hospital was that I had had the operation and that was that.

“We were desperate and did not know who to turn to, when by chance my daughter found the number of the Hospice of the Valleys in the phone book.”

It is five years since Ms Durham left her job as an NHS district nurse and joined the Hospice of the Valleys, one of the few care organisations offering a 24-hour service, 365 days a year to terminally ill patients.

Based in Tredegar, the birthplace of Aneurin Bevan, the hospice serves the borough of Blaenau Gwent, treating 483 patients in their homes last year and seeing a further 2,696 attendences at drop-in and Saturday clinics.

As a consequence of its holistic approach to care, and the dedication of the nurses to patients and their families, 63 per cent of the hospice’s patients were able to die at home, compared to the national average of just 23 per cent.

But while Bevan, the founder of the NHS, would no doubt welcome the level of care being provided in his former constituency, this service, which costs £78,000 a month, is funded largely by donations, not by the Government.

Like many of the 240 local hospices across the UK, the Hospice of the Valleys is an independent charity, and relies in part on support from Help the Hospices, the national charity of the hospice movement and one of the beneficiaries of The Times Christmas Appeal.

Ms Durham is responsible for the Blaina and Brynmawr areas of Blaenau Gwent, an area with mass unemployment and social deprivation, not to mention high rates of cancer and chronic disease.

Patients of the hospice vary from those in whom cancer has just been diagnosed to others who are in the terminal stages of their illnesses or those lucky enough to overcome the disease.

When patients are dying, they are visited at least once a day by a hospice nurse, but no two days are ever alike, she says. “I love the ethos and the holistic approach of Hospice of the Valleys, and the way in which we look after the whole family,” she says.

“We fill in a big percentage of the gaps that other services do not provide. The job varies from the very sad to the very happy; you see patients’ devastation when they are first diagnosed and you support them and their family through that. Then you get the drop-in clinics, where many patients are recovering and in happier times.”

In Mrs Haddow’s case, she was able to aid her recovery by acting as a patient advocate, negotiating with local health and social services to get her the dedicated care she needed.

The hospice operates under the rules of the Liverpool Care Pathway for the Dying Patient, which tries to anticipate the final needs of patients and families in advance so that there is no need to call a doctor.

Listening in on the hospice’s morning meeting, it’s obvious that the work of the nurses varies greatly, from dedicated medical care to social work or arranging benefits.

One nurse asks for advice on how to tell an 11-year-old boy that his father has cancer, while others discuss the tendency of some patients to swig the pain-relieving drug morphine from the bottle like an alcoholic drink.

But among these tales of distress and anguish there are also cards of thanks on the mantlepiece from relatives, and the testimonies of patients such as John Jones, 67, a retired engineer who was told he had 12 months to live after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer last year. “We knew the hospice because they had cared for my sister-in-law, so I was able to tell them as soon as I’d been diagnosed,” Mr Jones, from Nantyglo, said. “I eventually recovered after having chemo-therapy but being treated by the hospice nurses was like being wrapped in loving arms during a very difficult time.”

Ms Durham says that working nights is an important part of the job. “You can’t be ill to order,” she said. “We can get called out at 4am.”

But she added that the rewards of the job are “a greater sense of community and focus” than she had as an NHS nurse.

“Now I have the time for families, and to attend funerals of patients we have known and cared for is part of the job. It’s a rewarding job and it can be very sad. But what would these patients have if they didn’t have us?”