Sheffield United F.C. is proud to support six charities in South Yorkshire by promoting their work, encouraging donations from the community, and assisting with fundraising efforts. One of these charities is Sheffield Children’s Hospital Charity, which supports the pediatric hospital by raising vital funding for essential equipment, game-changing research, and life-saving medical care.
Sheffield Children’s Hospital Charity not only supports local families, but the thousands of children all over the world who are treated at Sheffield Children’s Hospital. The charity delivers over and above NHS provisions, helping children, young people, and their families receive the best possible care in a comfortable, child-friendly environment.
Funding for Four Key Areas
Sheffield Children’s Hospital Charity funds four key areas to support Sheffield Children’s NHS Foundation Trust, which manages the hospital:
- Equipment
- Facilities
- Environment
- Research
The charity’s dedicated staff and volunteers are incredibly proud of what they have been able to achieve—they’ve funded projects spanning everything from new CT scan machines to research on food allergies.
Equipment
Technological advancements are paving the way for development of faster diagnostic tools and more effective treatments. In NHS hospitals, however, funding for this cutting-edge equipment is not always available. Sheffield Children’s Hospital Charity helps bridge these funding gaps, enabling clinicians and care givers to access the latest innovations. Equipped with these tools, they’re more able to provide better care—diagnoses and treatments that are more accurate, less invasive, and tailored to each patient’s individual needs.
For example, the charity funded the hospital’s 2019 purchase of a SPECT CT scanner, which has improved imaging quality and capacity by allowing multiple types of scans in one machine. Clinicians are able to conduct nuclear medicine and CT scans in one visit and are able to conduct scans for certain groups of patients they weren’t able to before. Other specialist equipment funded by the charity include a hydrotherapy pool for physiotherapy, advanced arthroscopy equipment, and the region’s only lab dedicated solely to testing lung function in pediatric patients.
Facilities
By funding the creation of new facilities, Sheffield Children’s Hospital Charity has helped the hospital extend the range of treatments available for youth and meet the rising needs of families across the borough and beyond. To date, the charity has funded everything from vital ward refurbishments to the creation of dedicated therapy spaces and purpose-built areas for complex care. Each project is designed to improve the patient’s experience and enable healthcare professionals to deliver more specialist treatments in-house—thereby reducing wait and travel times while improving the continuity of care.
In this category, the charity was the sole funder of the hospital’s new Safeguarding Support Unit, a brand-new space where specialists assess young patients for safeguarding concerns related to neglect and abuse. The unit opened after 18 months of careful design and build work; input from staff and psychologists was solicited to create a welcoming space where children who have experienced trauma might feel safe. The new facility includes bigger, airier rooms, artwork, and interactive play equipment for kids of all ages.
Environment
Focusing on creating comfortable, engaging environments built with children in mind, Sheffield Children’s Hospital Charity invests in facility upgrades that enhance care across the hospital and other Sheffield Children’s NHS Foundation Trust facilities. The charity helps transforms clinical settings into comforting, engaging environments that feel less like a medical facility and more like home. From playful murals to sensory features, each detail is carefully considered to make stays and visits as pleasant as possible for both children and their families.
To this end, the charity helped fund renovations to the Wards 1 and 5 parent rooms, including new sofas, a new entryway for Ward 5, space for a new kitchen for Ward 1, and beautiful new artwork by the local group Art+. The charity also helped fund the creation of interactive mini-museums throughout the hospital. In this initiative, Art+ worked with Sheffield Museums to create displays of items from their collections.
Research
The charity has also made possible pioneering research to help clinicians better understand complex pediatric conditions and develop new treatments, protocols, therapies, and medicines. The charity’s ultimate goal is to enable Sheffield Children’s NHS Foundation Trust to lead the way in pediatric healthcare.
Ground-breaking research funded by the charity has paved the way for development of improved therapies, safer procedures, and more effective ways to support children’s recovery and long-term wellbeing. Such research not only benefits children and young people across Sheffield, but also creates scope to improve the lives of children and families all over the world.
Studies and research projects funded by Sheffield Children’s Hospital Charity have explored a variety of different conditions, diagnostic methods, and medical interventions, including rib unfolding CT scans, food allergies, sleep workshops, juvenile idiopathic arthritis, narcolepsy, anesthesia safety, and thermal imaging for pediatric diagnosis and monitoring. Notably, the charity was instrumental in funding the creation of the UK’s first medical research center dedicated exclusively to children. The £400,000 raised by the charity throughout 2007 made possible the establishment of the Sheffield Children’s Clinical Research Facility the following year.
Recent News
The charity recently announced an ambitious fundraising mission of raising £2 million for the construction of a world-class healthcare and research facility. The National Centre for Child Health Technology will be based at Sheffield Olympic Legacy Park and run by Sheffield Children’s NHS Foundation Trust.
Intended to address the biggest challenges in pediatric healthcare, the center will bring together clinicians, inventors, engineers, and academics to pioneer new technologies and cutting-edge treatments. A primary focus will be on treatments and interventions related to obesity, cancer, disease prevention, maternal and pediatric health inequalities, and mental health disorders. The facility will be able to provide treatment for more than 200 patients every day.
To learn more about plans for the facility and the capital appeal campaign, go to https://sheffieldchildrens.org/appeal/national-centre-for-child-health-technology/.