Alder Hey Children’s Charity raises vital funds to help make Alder Hey Children's Hospital a truly world-class, patient-friendly hospital for the 330,000 patients and families we care for every year.
Since 2013, over £65m has been raised for a range of life-saving medical equipment and facilities that are making a real difference to families every day - but we still need your support.
We need your support for our Surgical Neonatal Appeal
Our new Appeal is for a state-of-the-art unit for newborn babies in Liverpool, and was launched by Liverpool Legend Jamie Carragher.
Jamie, who was treated at Alder Hey’s neonatal ward for the first six weeks of his life, launched the appeal to raise £3m for the new Surgical NICU on behalf of Alder Hey Children’s Charity in September 2021.
The new Surgical NICU is a joint project between Alder Hey and Liverpool Women’s NHS Foundation Trust as the Liverpool Neonatal Partnership.
The new unit is planned to offer 22 neonatal cots, including 8 ICU and 13 HDU cots and will feature 18 individual family rooms where parents can be alongside their poorly new-borns whilst they’re receiving expert care.
The unit will address a shared concern between Liverpool Women’s and Alder Hey that babies who need specialist surgery currently have to be transferred to Alder Hey to get the specialist surgical care they need and are then transferred back to Liverpool Women’s Hospital to continue their specialist neonatal care.
The planned facility will cost around £20m to build with the Charity Appeal aiming to contribute at least £3m.
Charity funding will provide ‘over and above’ enhancements and equipment for both the clinical space and family areas, elevating it from a facility that provides families with a safe and secure environment for them and their new-borns, to a truly world-class facility that wraps-around families with the most vulnerable babies in the region.Specialist neonatal staff from Liverpool Women’s Hospital will plan to work alongside Alder Hey at the new NICU ensuring that poorly babies are transferred between the two hospitals as little as possible.
Join our Regular Giving programme
Making a regular monthly donation of just £5 per month allows us to plan ahead and commit to projects and funding requirments ahead of time, ensuring our patients are looked after now, tomorrow and the day after. You can sign up to join our army of regular donors here.
Consider leaving a gift in your will
At Alder Hey Children’s Charity, gifts in wills left by our kind supporters are transforming the lives of our young patients and their families. These special gifts help us develop crucial new treatments, fund state-of-the-art medical equipment and create magical ward experiences during a child’s time at Alder Hey.
As an NHS charity our funds come entirely from donations, events and gifts in wills contributed by a nation of caring people - people who want to leave a parting gift that will create a brighter future for the next generation. If you’re considering this wonderful gesture, then find out more here.
Why an NHS hospital needs your support
Children and young people have very different requirements from a hospital than adult patients. The charity recognises this and helps to fund state of the art equipment and a range of activities and projects that are designed to enhance and improve the lives of our amazing young patients when they are being treated.
We fund specialist medical equipment which ensures our brilliant surgeons and clinical staff have the most up to date state-of-the-art technology available to them – often equipment that is just not available yet via the NHS. We also fund hi-tech distraction equipment proven to reduce pain and anxiety in our patients, ensure faster appointments without sedation. Donations help us support a vast range of programmes and special projects such as our ward musicians, our on-site magician and the play specialists we have on every ward. Our ground-breaking ward-based chef programme ensures we are delivering healthy and nutritionally balanced food to all our patients when they need it most.
In the last few years donations large and small have enabled us to complete an incredibly important new research and education facility as well as fully funding the design and construction of a brand new bereavement centre on the hospital campus. We continue to raise money and awareness to help with an amazing facility opening in late 2022 which will impact on mental health services for children and young people for decades to come.
4 more reason to support us
We need your support for our mental health appeal
In Spring 2020 we launched our £3m Children's Mental Health Appeal, supported by Appeal Ambassador Shirley Ballas.
Our 7 in 10 Appeal highlighted that 70% of young people with a mental health condition are currently missing out on vital mental health interventions at a sufficiently early age the Appeal is aiming to raise vital funds to enhance inpatient and community mental health services at Alder Hey Children’s NHS Foundation Trust, enabling more children to access the treatment they need at the time they need it.
Long term supporter of Alder Hey Children’s Charity, Shirley Ballas was keen to back the campaign saying: “I know from my own personal experience how important this work is. There is a very real need for children to have access to appropriate care and treatment as soon as possible. This Appeal is a chance for everyone to help shape the future of mental healthcare for children and young people across the whole country.”
You can still donate and help make a difference to thousands of children every year from across the region and the country.
We need your support for our fresh food-on-demand service
Good nutrition is critical for patients who are recovering in hospital. Alder Hey is the first children's hospital in the UK to have dedicated chefs on every patient ward who prepare fresh, nutritious evening meals for patients, whenever they want to eat.
Poor nutrition can lead to weight loss, a weakened immune system and slower recovery - resulting in longer hospital stays for young patients.
At Alder Hey, in-patients can order food from a chef working on the same ward, who will then prepare their meal and serve it in their bedroom. Families already love this service, and say it provides better nutrition and a better experience in hospital, as well as reducing food waste.
With your support, we will enhance this service to focus on healthy eating, liaison with dieticians and education programmes for families and staff.
We need your support for next-generation technology to change hospital visits forever
We are fundraising to revolutionise the hospital experience for young patients and families, by piloting next-generation technology to reduce anxiety, distract patients during procedures and to help parents relax too. This has been a real success, but we now need your support so all of our waiting areas can be entertaining and fun environments for patients. Your support will help fund this digital Alder Hey project.
Alder Hey is already home to some of this amazing technology. Our digital fish tank, where patients waiting for daycase surgery can relax by designing a sea creature and watch it swim, is the only one of its kind in Europe.
To help manage anxiety before arriving, we want patients to use our app, Alder Play, to explore a digital version of Alder Hey to see their ward and meet staff. The app provides games and augmented reality features to distract patients during a stay, as well as link to a reward scheme encouraging a healthy lifestyle.
We need your support for research, innovation and education
Your support will help us develop better, safer medicines and treatment to benefit young patients at Alder Hey and children across the world.
We’re not satisfied treating children using today’s medicines and technologies, we want to find the very best treatments we can. That’s why we’re working to develop the next generation of medicines and interventions that are even more effective, and safer.
To support this vision we have helped to fund a new state of the art research and innovation facility that will enable us to help even more patients.
Our ambition to improve children’s health also means we’re using cutting edge technology, to develop new ways to treat children more effectively. We’re testing new sensor technology to help us identify infections and we’re printing children’s X-Rays in 3D so our surgeons can use these as a guide in surgery.
We’re not standing still. We’re not only developing new medicines and treatments, we‘re also training nearly 1,000 healthcare professionals each year, who are able to learn the latest skills and techniques from some of the world’s leading clinicians and researchers.