CARING for critically ill babies and children as well as helping to ease the stress it causes their families is the huge task faced by the children’s intensive care unit based at Southampton General Hospital.
Members were told how the paediatric intensive care unit, known as PICU, treated seriously ill youngsters from all over the south of England.
Rosie Mitchell, a staff nurse at the unit, and Lee Nash, chairman of the Friends of PICU, a fundraising charity, said that more than 900 children a year are admitted to the unit each year, with serious heart disease, massive trauma after road accidents or other complex illnesses.
Rosie Mitchell, a nurse for thirty years, said the charity was set up in 2006 to raise money to buy vital equipment the NHS could not provide.
She cited a number of examples including the purchase of portable ventilators that enabled sick children who needed oxygen to leave their beds.
“They can go out into the garden with their parents which is lovely for children who are in hospital for a long time,” she said.
Retrieval ambulances, staffed with specialist teams, were needed to collect young patients and return them to their homes and the charity had a rolling programme of fundraising to purchase a new vehicle every five years at a cost of £120,000.
They also wanted to raise more than £100,000 to cover the cost of employing a clinical psychologist for three years in the hope that the Primary Care Trust will then take it over.
Another aim is to improve accommodation for families of children being treated at the unit as they can often be there for months.
Mr Nash, who became involved because his young son has been a patient at the unit, said everyone who visited PICU was so impressed with the work carried out there that they wanted to give something back.
*Rosie Mitchell and Lee Nash are pictured with club president Rosemary Coward.