15 April 2021

Guest Blogger: Fern Jameson

As Bristol Royal Hospital for Children (BRHC) prepares to celebrate its 20th birthday, Fern Jameson, Ward Sister on Lighthouse Ward, tells us more about working at the hospital and the impact charity donations have.

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I’m immensely proud of our team on Lighthouse Ward. We have a group of highly skilled and dedicated nurses who champion best care delivery with a holistic and family-centred approach.  Being a Ward Sister means you are enveloped in the day to day running of the ward as well as sharing a vision for service improvement and empowering and enabling your team to be able to do their job to the best of their ability.  One of the favourite parts of my job is supporting nurses to find their passion within their role and to foster and develop that passion so that it brings about service improvement for the families in our care. 

The nature of renal disease means that our patients are in hospital very frequently and also have many treatments at home.  We care for patients aged 0-18 years with any aspect of renal disease and cover the whole of the South West region.

It’s really important given the length of time our families have to spend here that we make the ward as welcoming and comforting as possible and keep the family centred approach in the forefront of our minds in all that we do. 

In an NHS climate where we are always being asked to deliver more with less resources charity funding is absolutely invaluable.

Above & Beyond support our unit’s representation at the National Transplant Games. This is an opportunity for our children to take part in physical activities that they, for their whole life pre-transplant, wouldn’t feel well enough to do.  It means we get to participate in a great event for health promotion and it’s a real celebration of their new life for the families who attend.  It enables the children to have a great sense of achievement, pride and motivation when previously they have been debilitated by their need for dialysis or the nature of their disease.  

The charity has also funded equipment to support home dialysis.  Families often have to make many changes to their home to accommodate taking on the delivery of their child’s dialysis – whilst there is NHS funding for the actual medical supplies there is often a gap in the equipment provided to support this home therapy.  An example of this a trolley for the dialysis machine to sit on where parents can have a sterile field to set up the machine and necessary equipment or a tray with hooks on that parents can use to hang the multiple bags of fluid from. 

These may not sound like essential pieces of equipment but they can change the lives of a dialysis patient and their parent or carer.

For our team knowing they can make life even just a little bit easier can make a huge difference.

Will you wish the Children’s Hospital a happy birthday by donating £20 to celebrate 20 years?

Wish BRHC a happy birthday