Daniele Giudici
Daniele's Critical Care Memory Box Project fundraising @ Sim Stickers Simracersworld Formula 3 Series - Season 2 Round 5
Fundraising for Poole Hospital Charity (account closing)
Story
Thanks for taking the time to visit my JustGiving page.
On Thursday 20/08/2020 I will be racing in the Sim Stickers Simracersworld Formula 3 Series to raise funds for the Memory Box Project at Poole Hospital Foundation Trust.
Youtube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AMBr8V9LIc
Twitch link: https://www.twitch.tv/damn_gigantz
Who Am I?
My name is Daniele and I work as a critical care pharmacist at Poole Hospital. Sim racing and the SRW community helped me cooping with challenging situations, both at work and in my personal life, during Covid-19 so I decided use this platform to support a dear project led by some amazing nurses of the critical care team.
The Project
The idea for the Memory Box Project came in late 2017, when a young patient died suddenly on Critical Care. She was the mother of very young pre-school children and we wanted to do something for them. It became apparent that nowhere else in The Trust was able to provide Memory Boxes for us to give to the children and so we set about
creating our own. This is an unexpected and sudden event and the families have little or no time to plan or adjust.
The project aims to provide each child with their very own individualised box, appropriate for their age, and they are involved in collecting the items included. They can then keep their box at home, for the rest of their lives, adding items as they wish.
This is much more than just a box of objects. Trained nurses spend quality time with the child or children, creating the contents of
the box and helping them understand that it’s OK to feel sad. This process allows the children to spend meaningful time with their parent, the opportunity to ask questions, express their ideas about what is happening and to create some memories relating to that day.
As well as helping with hand-prints the children are given the opportunity to take an active part in creating other memory box items and to provide hands on care to their parent such as hair brushing and applying hand lotion. They are also able to draw pictures or write letters which stay with their parent after death, with an identical copy given to them to keep in their box.
Memory boxes are an extension of the care that we give and can be a positive moment on what is a devastating and upsetting time.
The Box
Each box (which varies dependant on the age of the child and
the contents of the box) costs approximately £30.00 and £50.00 to produce.
The boxes include information sheets, books/booklets, teddy bears, hand printing & clay imprint kits, along with lock of hair, letter writing sets and journals. The children are then encouraged to continue adding their own items at home over time, anything which may invoke a happy memory.
We also provide a pack of information for the adult who will be caring for the children after the death of their parent. This includes a book about supporting grieving children and information on where to access longer term support from local and national child bereavement charities.
Current status and future plansThe project was started in 2018 thanks to a small monetary donation and the many fundraising events and kind donations we have received since then have allowed it to continue and to grow. To date Critical Care has distributed over 40 boxes to bereaved children ranging from 0 years to 17 years old.
More recently the project has started to reach out to children bereaved in other areas of the hospital, especially after the recent Covid-19 pandemic. The project is planning to extend its service to areas like oncology where the memory box could really help lots of families to cope with devastating and upsetting events.
To the team's knowledge this is the first hospital to provide this service and is now actively involved in supporting other hospitals to introduce their own memory boxes.