Tiny Babies   Big Appeal

Thank you for visiting my Just Giving page through which I hope to help raise money to build a new Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at Birmingham Women's Hospital.

I shall be running another half marathon in October, this time in Birmingham. It's the first time that I have run to raise money, because it's for a really good Birmingham cause.  Partly it's to try and keep up with my fitter colleagues and partly because I am a non-executive director at the Women's.

But mainly, it's because as a paediatrician, I have seen a revolution in the outcome for tiny, premature babies in just my professional life time. As a trainee paediatrician in the 1970s, I well remember the all too frequent tragedy of small babies dying who we were unable to save.  Since then there has been a dramatic change, and most tiny babies now survive and grow up to lead normal lives. This has been entirely because of the work of units like the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at Birmingham Women's Hospital, and the skilled, dedicated staff who work there.

Unfortunately, the current accommodation for tiny babies at the Women's is no longer adequate to support the demands that are increasingly being made on it, and so we need a new one. Most of the money (£5 million) is coming from the hospital but we still need to raise £2 million to complete the task. You can be confident that your money will make a real difference. Put simply, we cannot manage without it. You can also be confident that completing the run will involve real hardship on my part!

Thank you for taking the time to read this. I very much hope that you can help with what I think is a really good cause. If you would like to, just click "Donate now"

To see more about why I'm doing this see:  http://www.onetruemedia.com/my_shared?z=3bc489e562b08721daff37&utm_source=otm&utm_medium=text_url