As the Fundraising Arm of the Red Cross War Memorial Children's Hospital - the only stand alone, dedicated specialist paediatric hospital in southern Africa - the Trust and its donors play an important role in ensuring that children are receiving the best medical care possible.

Supporting the Red Cross War Memorial Children's Hospital

The Children's Hospital Trust has identified four main ways in which we can support the Hospital:

1. Continuing to maintain and enhance the physical infrastructure of the Hospital to best help its patients, their families and the Hospital's staff.

2. To equip the Hospital to a level conducive with the best training and patient care support.

3. Supporting paediatric specialist training, locally and throughout Africa which enables the skills base within the Hospital, across the country and indeed the continent, to be maintained and improved. The African Paediatric Training Fellowship is the pioneering example of such an initiative as well as the Harry Crossley Nurses Training Programme.

4. Supporting facilities the Hospital itself supports and helps. This could be a secondary level health clinic where skilled staff from the Hospital go and help train staff in child health care, or supporting the step-down facilities where the Hospitals patients on long-term treatment are accommodated. This could also include funding research and finding solutions for childhood diseases in the African context.

This four-pronged strategy broadens the ways in which the Trust can both help the Hospital and support those it relies upon and develop the skills desperately needed in South Africa. Beyond this strategy, the role of the Children's Hospital Trust in serving as a catalyst to develop new and sustainable initiatives adds a further dimension that the Trust brings to helping children in need.

Supporting Governments Goals

The Provincial Government of the Western Cape (PGWC) objectives for 2010 are embodied in its Comprehensive Service Plan (CSP) and one of the main goals is to improve outreach into all communities. The Hospital's strategy in turn supports this by ensuring that the sickest children are treated at the Red Cross War Memorial Children's Hospital, where complex and specialised interventions can be fully resourced.

Partnerships for Sustainability

Simultaneously the Trust, in partnership with the Hospital and the University of Cape Town, is participating in the development of important paediatric staff training projects as well as community outreach projects. Adopting these roles falls within the Trust's Five Year Strategic Plan and further ensures that donor funds are invested into sustainable paediatric healthcare projects that directly impact the Hospital's ongoing ability to treat the sickest of Africa's children.

The Red Cross War Memorial Children's Hospital and Other Health Care Facilities

In researching the needs of the Hospital, the Trust has visited the essential step-down facilities that the Red Cross War Memorial Children's Hospital relies upon - St Joseph's which cares for many of the long term cancer patients and Sarah Fox, which is the home where many of the Burns Unit patients stay. They are separate organisations yet integrally linked to the Hospital, and provide exceptional service to children. They also fall within the Government's aim to strengthen outlying healthcare services and the Trust is interested in how their success allows the Hospital to rather focus on the most complex and serious cases.

You can help the Children's Hospital Trust realise its five year strategic plan by donating much needed funding - 100% of which goes to the various projects supported by the Trust.