Some exciting news from The Christian Blandford Fund

It’s been a busy few months at The CBF. We have been finalising a very exciting project that we have been working on for the last 2 years.

The fabulous news is that we effectuated a new Clinical Psychologist for the teenagers and young adults at The Royal Marsden Hospital .

The psychology team at the hospital provide support for the TYA’s and have seen a huge increase in referrals in the last year, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic.  They were seriously overstretched and did not have the capacity to offer the psychological support that the unfortunate teenagers seriously needed during cancer treatment.

The new member of staff will be part of the outreach program so will help teenagers and young adults at other hospitals in the South East including St George’s.

This is not something that The CBF would normally support as we try to avoid financing projects which we feel should be paid for by the NHS. We tend to focus on the extras that are not covered by central government funds. Claudia was the main driver for this project and persuaded the rest of the trustees that, although it is expensive, it very much fits our mandate to improve lives of children and their families during prolonged stays in hospital.

We are delighted that this new resource is now in place and would not have happened without our financial help.

Our contribution of £45,752 will pay for the psychologist for a year. After this time we hope and expect their value to have been demonstrated and the psychologist to be retained through hospital funds.

We have also started to prepare for Claudia’s terrific biennial Christmas Fair!

Today we received our first donation for the raffle – a stunning print of The Stag Theatre in Sevenoaks by the artist Susie West.

Susie is an artist who is painting her way around Britain’s cities, towns and villages.  Please do have a look at her website https://www.artistsusiewest.com/ or follow her on Instagram “artistsusiewest”

If you have a local shop and would like to be involved please contact Claudia for further details. Here are a few pictures from the last event.

Peter

Trustee of The Christian Blandford Fund
Posted in Blog, Fund Raising, Things We've Done.

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