Southern staff vote to donate £651 to coastal charity

Love Your Hospital, a charity supporting three hospitals run by Western Sussex Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, has benefited from over £600 as a result of votes by Southern staff.

The charity which funds projects to benefit patients at St Richard’s in Chichester, Southlands in Shoreham and Worthing Hospital, was included as one of the three good causes which staff could vote on when they completed the company’s Employee Survey.

Each completed survey resulted in a £1 donation, which staff could allocate as they saw fit. Love Your Hospital was put forward by Competency Developer Christine Reeves, in recognition of the support Worthing Hospital gave to her after her son was born prematurely, two years ago. In total, 651 staff voted for the cause and a donation for this amount was made by Southern. The funds will now be split between three wards at the hospital: the Special Care Baby Unit, Maternity ward and Bluefin children's ward.

Speaking about the donation, Head of Midwifery, Tracey Mudd said: “We’d like to say a huge thank you to Christine and her colleagues at Southern for thinking of us and raising funds for the three wards where Christine and her son, Alexander received care. We feel very privileged and this fantastic donation will go towards helping other families and newborns in the future. ”

Speaking about the donation, Christine added: “My little Alexander was at Worthing hospital for eight frightening days, after he was born a month early having not grown for an unknown amount of time. He weighed 4lb 7.5oz and had blood sugar, temperature and stomach problems. They took brilliant care of him and the midwives helped me no end. A few weeks after that, at seven weeks of age and still not near average birth weight Alexander spent another week in the hospital fighting an unknown infection that they thought for five days was meningitis. Worthing SCBU, Maternity and Dolphin wards are amazing and took such good care of us. I nominated them because of all the above and I loved the chance of giving something back on behalf of my precious, now happy and healthy, boy.”