Becky Coates, James Coates, Jessica Meese and friends are running the Stevenage Half Marathon on Sunday 7 November 2010 to raise money for Enhance Herts, a charity which raises money for hospitals in Hertfordshire.  The charity fund raises to support the financing of state of the art equipment, improved surroundings and new research.

The reason we are running this race is to ‘give something back’ to the brilliant staff who work in Lister Hospital’s Intensive Care and High Dependency Units.

In August 2009, Becky and James's Mum, Pam, was taken into hospital with difficulty breathing and subsequently had a long stay on a ventilator in the Intensive Care and High Dependency Units at the hospital.

We are pleased to say that Pam made a recovery and came home in November 2009.  This was not just down to her own amazing will power and determination, but with the treatment, care and support of the fantastic Lister Hospital staff that looked after her.

All the staff in the ICU and HDU at Lister are truly amazing, they work very long hours in very stressful situations and not only care for their patients, but the families around them who are suffering as well.

Whilst not surprisingly, and understandably, funds are allocated to new research and new equipment, we really want to raise £2,000 to go towards improving the doctors and nurses staff room to make the breaks that they have as comfortable and relaxing as possible.  We feel that by contributing in some small way to supporting the welfare of the staff this will also help many more patients who need their specialist care.

We welcome anybody to come and support us on the day - we'll be the ones at the back wondering what we've let ourselves in for!

Thank you all very much for your generous donations!

Becky, James and Jess