This Year at Ipswich High School for Girls, we are aiming to
raise £10,000 to support the new Woolverstone Macmillan Centre at Ipswich Hospital by participating in different events throughout the academic year.

We have already started our fundraising events including our Roald Dahl Day and a fantastic Silent Disco in the Autumn Term. In March, the girls will undertake the Ipswich High School Extreme Triathlon where each and every pupil in the School (from age 3-18) will play their part in swimming the distance of the English Channel, cycling the distance from School to Athens  or running the distance from Land's End to John O'Groats!

There are over 27,000 people currently living with cancer in Suffolk and sadly these numbers are set to double by 2030. For the new generation, 1 in 2 people will hear the devastating news that they have cancer. In Ipswich, patients undergoing treatment receive their care at the Woolverstone Wing of Ipswich Hospital. But as more people than ever before have been using these facilities, the rooms became overcrowded, tired and were no longer fit for purpose. This has led to increased patient waiting times and tremendous difficulties for staff.

In 2014, Macmillan Cancer Support launched an appeal to raise £3.7 million for a new Woolverstone Macmillan Centre at Ipswich Hospital. The new centre has three gardens, five treatment areas, and enough room for friends and family members to stay during treatment. The overall capacity has doubled, as now more than 21,000 people will be able to use this new facility for their chemotherapy, oncology and haematology treatments each year. Macmillan feel very lucky to have been able to open the new unit in Spring 2016, and now we desperately need to cover the cost of the fantastic new facility so that we can continue to improve local cancer services.

The new unit features beautiful murals depicting recognisable Suffolk landscapes, Woolverstone features in the waiting room, and welcomes anxious patients to the centre. It is a calming and colourful distraction. At Ipswich High School for Girls’ we are proud to support a local project that is already changing the lives of thousands of people in our local community.