The Business Product Team Stadium to Stadium Walk

Myself and a number of colleagues will be walking 20.2 miles from St. James Park (Newcastle FC) to The Stadium of Light (Sunderland AFC) in support of the Bubble Foundation. This will take part on Friday 5th June and so far have around 50 colleagues signed up to participate.

Based at Ward 3 of the Great North Children’s Hospital at the RVI in Newcastle, the Bubble Foundation saves the lives of babies and children born with broken immune systems.

There are only two centres in the UK and Ireland who can treat these children - here and Great Ormond Street in London.

Children on Ward 3 are undergoing a lifesaving bone marrow transplant. They will likely be on the ward for about 5 months, on a special bed with an air flow system which acts like a bubble. Access to their rooms is via an airlock and there are strict infection control measures in place. Think COVID lock down but even stricter. A parent or carer stays with their child, sleeping on a camp bed in their room. Families are uprooted from their home lives, often leaving other children, a partner and their job, sometimes hundreds of miles away, moving to an unknown city and challenging hospital conditions. It’s an incredibly stressful time.

Without a bone marrow transplant these babies and children will die. The NHS provides the medical care. The Bubble Foundation provides equipment and toys for the children and practical support for parents. We also fund vital research to improve diagnosis and treatment of the conditions. Research funded by the Bubble Foundation has led to survival rates of over 90%, up from about 50% over the last 20 years.

Your donations can help fund:

£6 provides a Bubble Foundation beanie for children on the ward when chemotherapy causes hair loss.

£10 provides books for a new patient. We can’t reuse books as they can’t be cleaned so we provide new books for each child when they start their journey on Ward 3.

£20 provides a Journey Box for each patient. A welcome pack for the patient and their family with things to help them navigate and record the journey ahead of them.

£25 provides light meals and snacks in the Parent Room cupboard for a week. For those days when carers can’t leave the ward, or they just need a snack to keep them going.

£100 provides age-appropriate craft activities and games for the Play Team to use in their daily sessions with each patient on the ward for 2 – 3 months.

£400 funds a research student for a week. We fund research programmes that are focused upon increasing knowledge about types of immune deficient conditions and improving individual treatment of patients and their survival rates. We are currently supporting a PhD fellow, who is looking at the immune reactions in lungs post-transplant.