Equipment purchased with funds generated from an appeal by the East & North Hertfordshire Hospitals’ Charity has made a significant impact to families and patients of children’s services at Lister Hospital.
The ‘Helping Little Heartbeats’ appeal was launched in February 2021 to raise £70,000 to purchase equipment – a GE Vivid cardiovascular ultrasound machine, a portable echo cardiogram machine and oxygen saturation monitors – so that children with heart conditions could be treated locally at Lister by a specialist paediatric team, instead of having to travel to London with their parents.
Parents such as Laura, who spoke on the launch of the campaign:
In May 2021, my youngest son Benjamin fell over at home and knocked out his front tooth on our bed post just a couple of weeks before his 2nd birthday. He wasn’t really eating and became very lethargic so we took him to A&E at Lister Hospital and he was admitted for tests. We were so lucky that we had to just walk down a corridor for this scan. It was incredibly thorough and thankfully showed no heart damage both at the time and 6-months later at his follow up appointment.
Dr Will Topping, who works for the Trust as a consultant cardiothoracic radiology at Lister Hospital, supported fundraising efforts by completing a 10k run with his sister. He said:
I had personal experience of my children having to visit the adult cardiology department for some tests. We shouldn’t be asking children who might be unsettled or frightened about visiting a hospital to visit adult departments.
As a doctor and a dad, I’d like to thank everyone who supported the appeal and has helped us provide this equipment so we can treat children here at Lister Hospital by our experienced paediatric team.
This Valentine’s, the East and North Hertfordshire Hospitals’ Charity have focused fundraising efforts on a new ‘Love the NHS’ campaign, encouraging donations to support hard-working NHS staff with initiatives to boost morale and support the physical and emotional wellbeing of staff.
