My secondment started 1st November and I had been looking forward to this for a good few weeks.
On my very first day I had a meeting at Alder hey with Ian Atkinson manager of Cardiac, ICU, HDU, k2 and 01 clinic, Jamie Hester who is doing project work from Uni and Becky Cartwright, a member of CHA and also a parent governor at Alder Hey.
Our meeting was to meet and see how we could help each other. Ian is very keen to show us support and help us more to get promoted around the hospital and make sure families know where they can get help.
Ian has agreed we can have more space to bring alive our brand and be seen much more visibly. He has also committed to himself or a member of his team coming to our branch meetings at Ronald Mcdonald house at Alder Hey each month which is a big commitment and something we have never seen before which in itself is a huge success. This I believe would not have been possible if it was not for my secondment as I just would not have had the time to go to daytime meetings as I would normally be at work. Ian has also asked me to join the Northwest Congenital Heart Network to find out more about what can be done to support more families and to have a say about what we think will help others. Again this is something I would not have been able to do as meetings are at Manchester Children’s hospital during the day as a direct result of my secondment I am able to take this on and hopefully be able to help even more families.
After that meeting I went to see the cardiac liaison nurses in 01 clinic and agreed Becky and I will update the notice boards and see what they need from us and where we could put up more publicity.
On Wednesday I was doing pick up’s for our charity shop which is coming up this month, and also met with a mum who needed to have a chat, just for support as her son is 15 and she saw a documentary on TV about a child who had grown up with a heart condition and is now around 22 and needs a transplant and it upset her a bit. So I went round for a chat.
On Thursday I met with my sister Michelle (mum of Matthew), Michele Casey, Lisa Welsh and her mum, Carole, at our storage unit as we needed to get prizes sorted and wrapped for our Ball on November 19th. We received donations from companies and split them into Auction, raffle and tombola prizes. We then needed to list them too. Incredibly this took 6hrs as I had to get stuff out the unit into the corridor so we could pull stuff together. Michelle had to go after 2 and half hrs as the school phoned to go pick up Matt as he was not well. He has been sent home from school a number of times lately due to not being well. Because I could do this from 9.30am it also meant after I had finished I was able to go and see my other nephew Will play football after school which was lovely, his team won 5-4. It gives me more time to myself as in previous years when we have done this we have met at 7.30pm so you can imagine it’s very, very late when we left the storage unit for home and sometimes had to go to someone’s house another day and finish off.
On Friday, I took more stuff to the unit that people had donated for our shop and got my house in order as there was stuff in my house that I just hadn’t had the time to take, so my house is now looking much more like a house and not a storage place. It’s about 30 mins to drive to the storage place so I need an hour just for driving for a round trip excluding any time I spend there. I also looked at some bigger units as I plan to do more fundraising e.g. charity shops and book sales and need more space to hold more stuff as I hope people will be even more generous and donate even more stuff to make this possible. I also booked 5 charity shop weeks for 2012
Saturday morning we had a ‘Taking CHA Forward’ meeting. The meeting was over breakfast and a big success 17 people attended which was a good turn out. It’s one thing discussing what we can do, it’s another committing time to do the things you say you will do when you work. Now I have a “to do” list and next week I will start following those actions we spoke about. The meeting was 10am till 2 so a lot has come out of it and it gave people chance to meet others who they may not have met before.
Tonight I have had my brother Billy over to show me how to attach pictures to emails something I am learning about and never done before. Impressed myself if this works.
So as you can see I fitted a lot in my first week alone and look forward to the challenges ahead and helping others.
If you haven’t tried being a volunteer before for a local charity I can highly recommend it. It give you a great sense of giving something back and being able to help other less fortunate than ourselves. So why not think – can I donate even 3 hrs a week to your local chosen charity. There are so many charities out there that could benefit from your help, The people you meet are usually great as they want to be there – thats why they have chosen to do voluntary work so it’s not a chore its a choice so you find people are usually much happier in their work
Val Frew
A very proud volunteer of CHA
