Tom Voss, 31, from High Wycombe, counselled patients, carers, the bereaved and cancer survivors during his voluntary stint at the hospice – always flagging up beforehand that he was a trainee.
He said: “I think the hospice is fantastic. Any organisation is only as good as the individual parts that make it up and I think that everyone at Butterfly House is amazing in their own way.
“Their compassion overall is what stands out – everyone is so understanding and everyone listens and everyone just cares. It really helped me starting off my career in an organisation such as this.”
Tom, who is currently awaiting his final professional results before becoming fully qualified as a counsellor, says he learnt ‘more than I could say’ from his experience at Butterfly House between 2023 and 2025. He says the one-hour sessions with clients were ‘incredibly rewarding’.
“I learnt so much and I learnt something new from each client – I learnt as much from them as they learnt from me.”
Butterfly House is now part of Florence Nightingale Hospice Charity.
Tom’s thoughts were echoed by Juliette Coffey, Patient Listening & Counselling Lead. She described him as ‘the most amazing asset to our team’.
She said: “I want to thank Tom for all of his fantastic client work as a counsellor and for being such a great presence in the Florence Nightingale Community.”
Tom, who currently works as a lighting technician while he studies, has been training for his new counselling career since 2020.
He says he decided to go into counselling to ‘make sense of my own life’.
“I was driven by a desire to help people,” he said. “Initially, I studied Biomed at university because I wanted to learn more about human health and human illness. I enjoyed it but it wasn’tnecessarily the thing for me.”
He discovered in 2022 that he had Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).
“I didn’t do as well at uni as hoped and found it very difficult to self-motivate in education – as anyone who has ADHD will understand. Ideally now, I am angling to do professional client work with a specialism in neurodiversity for other people.”
Tom stresses he is happy to be open about his ADHD because it is an important part of his work as a counsellor.
He was also driven to be a counsellor due to health problems suffered in his family in the past, including the death of his father from melanoma when Tom was aged 16. This loss delayed his A levels and he said: “I didn’t see through the fog for quite a few years until after uni. After soul searching and some counselling, I thought maybe a career in counselling is for me because it seemed to be a good fit and I was very curious.”
Tom applied for a placement at Butterfly House in 2023 because he needed 100 hours to be able to quality.
“I had a recommendation from one of the other students on my course that Butterfly House was really good, and a principle my Dad followed was to ‘pay it forward’ – so working in a hospice seemed a really good way of doing this.”
He says his experiences at the hospice have been ‘very emotive and very relatable’.
“The life I have led so far and my need to understand it, the suffering I have experienced - by helping others I get to redeem it and get something positive from it,” he said.
“As a counsellor, you need compassion and patience – we have to resist the need to fix. We cannot fix people’s problems for them even if we want to – we want to help people but we are powerless to rescue in any way and have to be aware of that.”
He praised the hospice for the way in which it welcomed him.
“I was so nervous when I first stepped through the door but, because of the atmosphere created by these incredibly compassionate people, over time that just evaporated.
“Butterfly House really helped my journey as a counsellor – I wouldn’t have wanted my placement to have been anywhere else.”
For more information about counselling and placements at Butterfly House contact:
