The Children's Heart Appeal
Did you know that almost one
in every hundred children is born
with a heart problem?
Or that congenital heart defects are the most common of all life-threatening abnormalities?
Though many cases can be dealt with through regular monitoring, a significant number of children will require life-saving open-heart surgery, often in the first weeks of life. Without this surgery, less than one in ten children with serious heart conditions will survive.
Birmingham Children’s Hospital has one of the busiest Children’s Heart Centres in the UK. Our internationally renowned Cardiac Unit sees over 10,000 children a year, with approximately 80% of surgeries being open-heart procedures, and around 60% performed on children under 12 months old.
Over the last five years, the demand for our cardiac services has increased dramatically. This is due to the fact that we can now treat more conditions than ever and because our excellent reputation is becoming more widely known around the UK.
Keeping up with the growing demand though is proving very difficult. This is why we need to replace our ageing facility with a new state-of-the-art one – and add a second cardiac theatre. This will be a new ‘hybrid’ cardiac theatre, the first of its kind at a UK children’s hospital. Here we’ll be able to perform surgical procedures and keyhole techniques simultaneously, offering exciting new horizons for the conditions we treat. It will also reduce the number of operations that children may need – and their lengths of stay in hospital.
Download the appeal brochure here
For further information or any other Fundraising query, suggestion or request, please contact the Appeal Team on 0121 333 8525 or info@bch.org.uk
