The First Three Months Having already said goodbye to the first quarter of 2017, it’s good for us as a charity to look at what we’ve achieved so far in the new year. 

Our day to day work includes dealing with requests for equipment, liaising with Hospitals and Doctors’ Surgeries, calling patients to ensure their equipment is working well, contacting suppliers ensuring we have sufficient equipment in stock and fund-raising. We have also completed the update of our website and submitted our annual accounts and charity report to the Charity Commission – these are available as downloadable PDFs from our website. To give an idea of some of the equipment loaned out this quarter we have respiration monitors given out to patients in Merseyside, Southwark, twins in Swindon and quads in Essex.

2017-first-3-months

Nebulisers have been sent to patients in Bradford, Shipley, Wakefield, Warrington, Northwich, Nottingham, Leicester, Warwickshire, Kings Lynn, Bedford, Buckingham, Oxford, Bristol, Southampton, and Exeter. Other equipment, including our new specialist PulseGuard monitor one of which is on the way to Northern Ireland, many regular spares packs have been sent to patients in all corners of the country and more specialised spares (sets, syringes and year packs for the Pari E-flow) have gone to a number of patients in the Yorkshire and Essex areas.

Sadly, death is a fact of life, during these initial months three of our long term patients have passed away. We are about to introduce a new page on our website, a Memorial Page, where those who have left us can be remembered – we ask family and friends to let us have editorial and photographic contributions for this. Further information about the page will be available when it is launched later in the year.

Patient visits have seen our Community Care teams visit patients in Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire, Wiltshire, Oxfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Cheshire, Hampshire and Essex areas just generally ‘catching up’, making sure all is well and their equipment is working properly. We are also making plans for future visits to those in the North East of England and Scotland in May and another to the West Country at the end of June.

With great help from public donations, grants, trusts and eager fund-raisers you can see we have been able to achieve much – THANK YOU. These days advertisements for charity appeals seem to dominate all walks of media, so we’re very grateful to those who continue to support us. We’re simply trying to offer our patients a quality of life we so often take for granted, more than that we want to help them to take a breath.