Family optician support hospitals charity to help premature babies
A family optician has chosen the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at our hospital to be its charity for the year after experiencing first-hand care from the NICU team.
William Amey and the team at Cecil Amey Opticians & Hearing Care will be raising money throughout the year in their 13 branches across Norfolk and Suffolk.
Donations will go towards purchasing a piece of equipment to diagnose and plan treatment for sight threatening Retinopathy of Prematurity (ROP) and other eye-related conditions in premature babies.
William and Alexandra’s son Ralph was born in NICU last August.
He said: “On the day, until the point Ralph was sent to NICU everything was going perfectly. My wife was booked in to have a Caesarean section and she was the first patient of the day, the nurses and midwives that day were brilliant and they couldn’t have made my wife more relaxed. “
“Unfortunately, about 45 minutes after birth – Ralph started to grunt. This was picked up straight away and a nurse from NICU was called to assess Ralph in recovery and a decision was made to move him to NICU. He spent a few days in room two, before being moved to room three and then his final night was spent with us in one of the flats in NICU itself.
“We used all support areas; the pump room, the rest area, the flats in NICU and McKee House on the NNUH site.”
The family’s experience was behind the decision to support the N&N Hospitals Charity NICU fund to purchase equipment to reduce the risk of irreversible loss of vision in a baby by enabling potential progression of any disease to be spotted by use of serial images.
In the womb, the retina develops slowly and the retinal blood vessels often only complete growing by the end of gestation. If a child is born prematurely, these blood vessels can grow abnormally causing damage to the retina and vision. This is called Retinopathy of Prematurity and affects around 20% of babies who are born prematurely.
The Charity is hoping to purchase equipment which will enable ophthalmologists to see how much of the eye is affected and how severe any damage might be.
Julie Cooper, Head of Charity said: “We are so grateful for the support of our local community, helping us to support even better care for patients at our NHS hospitals. Thank you to the team at Cecil Amey Opticians & Hearing Care for choosing to help us fund this piece of equipment, to provide improved care for eyesight for babies treated on the NICU at the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital.”
- To find out more about the work of the N&N Hospitals Charity and their work across the N&N or to support the charity, email charity@nnuh.nhs.uk