We are proud to launch the latest Rockinghorse Annual Report, showing the support we have received and the impact we have had on our local community during the last financial year.
As a registered charity, we are required to write a trustees’ annual report each year which includes our accounts for the previous financial year along with information about our work, where our money has come from and how it was spent during the year.
But along with being required by the Charity Commission, an annual report is also a way to help demonstrate what we do, particularly to our funders and beneficiaries, and shows the impact we have had as your local children’s hospital charity.
During this year, thanks to all the support we have received, we have helped babies, children, and young people with some amazing projects covering a wide range of areas including youth mental health, neurodiversity, wellbeing, and the world’s first precision medicine asthma clinic.
The projects we fund come directly from NHS doctors and nurses who see what’s happening on the ground within children’s healthcare and know what support will have the biggest impact.
The area of children and young people’s mental health is progressively becoming a huge issue for staff to manage, with numbers of referrals coming into the hospital increasing all the time.
Charlotte Harper, Children’s Emergency Department (ED) Consultant and lead for Paediatric Mental Health in the ED at the Royal Alexandra Children’s Hospital see this first hand. She said, ‘‘The number of Paediatric Mental Health presentations seen in the Children’s Emergency Department at the Royal Alexandra Children’s Hospital has significantly increased.
“A significant proportion of these patients also have other complex backgrounds, including neurodiversity. It is vital that we support these patients and their families, prevent them reaching crisis point & adapt to provide the best possible care.”
With one in five children experiencing some level of mental ill-health and self-harm rates in Brighton being almost 50% higher than the rest of the UK, it’s important our work reflects this need.
So, amongst the projects we have made possible this year have been a new teenage room in Worthing Hospital giving young people in the hospital a space to relax and feel safe, and our innovative Hospital Youth Worker service in the Royal Alex, offering teenagers with mental health issues additional support above and beyond what the NHS is currently able to provide.
We have also provided sensory equipment and toys to help children manage stressful situations whilst in hospital and organised wellbeing activities such as music therapy, woodland wellbeing sessions and art therapy to help children and young people manage their mental health around a new diagnosis or long-term health condition.
Donna Holland, Chief Executive of Rockinghorse said: “In our work it’s so important to be responsive and make sure we’re supporting the right people in the right way. We know from our close links with the wonderful NHS staff that mental health and neurodiversity issues are on the rise within children coming to hospital, so we want to make sure we’re reflecting this in the projects we fund.
“But of course, we’re also there for the children with cancer, the babies that can’t breathe and the young people learning to live with a long-term health condition. So thank you to everyone who supports us to change lives, improve lives and save lives. We couldn’t do this without you.”
Dr Oli Rahman, Chair of Rockinghorse Children’s Charity added: “This year’s report once again shows the impact Rockinghorse has had on the local community over the last year. More and more children and families are needing the support we provide, and this report really helps to show how we do this.”
So why not take a few minutes to have a read of our new report here and see how your support has helped so many children, families and health professionals across Sussex in the last year.
