Great Ormond Street Hospital is battling with buildings that are nearing the end of their useful lives and must urgently be replaced.
Without this redevelopment, advances in technology and treatments will not be so readily translated into real improvements in the care of sick children.
Inconvenient, cramped wards
We need to replace inconvenient, cramped, outdated wards with new facilities where parents can sleep alongside their child in comfort and where children can decide to leave their beds to eat their lunch in a separate room, visit the playroom or a computer.
New facilities will allow us to redesign how we work, to give a better, more flexible, convenient and comfortable service for our patients and their families. We will be able to treat more children and give our researchers and clinical staff the resources they need to develop new treatments.
We desperately need to upgrade our oldest facilities to provide the world-class standard of care we seek to deliver.
Increase in patient visits
We anticipate a 20 per cent increase in demand for our services - an estimated 20,000 more patient visits each year.
Thankfully, new and improved ways of working mean that the hospital will not need 20 per cent more beds, so current plans will see bed numbers increase by only 14 per cent. However, with clinical services already operating to their full capacity, we cannot meet the extra demand without new facilities.
The importance of caring for sick children and their families in suitable and comfortable surroundings has long been recognised.
Doing everything possible to help them cope with what can inevitably be a stressful and traumatic experience is vital and there can be no better care and reassurance than for a child to know their parent is right beside them.
