charity
This year we are supporting The Murray Parish Trust, a local charity founded by Sarah Parish and James Murray.
Back in 2009 my husband Jim and I lost our first daughter Ella-Jayne to a congenital heart defect. It was an incredibly distressing, life changing time for us and when we finally recovered from the horror of it all we felt an overpowering need to help the people that had given us the short time we’d had with Ella-Jayne, and we began actively fundraising for children's medical facilities. We went on to establish the Murray Parish Trust which is dedicated to the advancement of paediatric emergency medicine across the South of England. The charity ensures that children affected by major trauma can receive the best emergency care as close to home as possible. In the mid-term, our aim is to better equip University Hospital Southampton, a nationally recognised centre of excellence. In addition to our focus on treating children, we will also be investing in ground breaking research into childhood illness, pioneering equipment and the development of specialist training programmes.
Our current challenge is to raise £2 million. We are working together with Southampton Hospital Charity to build a new state of the art children’s emergency and major trauma department at University Hospital Southampton, for which we have successfully lobbied and secured match-funding from the Government - so every pound that Crawleyfest raises for us will be automatically doubled! Our #2MillionSteps campaign has already secured significant investment for this vital department, which will deliver life-saving and acute specialist care for critically ill children from across nine different regions, stretching from Devon to West Sussex, Oxfordshire to the Channel Islands. The new facility will allow children to be treated completely separately from adults, in an environment which is designed to minimise their distress and anxiety, and where the privacy and dignity of both young patients and their visiting families is preserved.
We're delighted and grateful to be supported by Crawleyfest - we hope you all have a fantastic time, and we'll join you if we can!
Sarah & Jim
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