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UPDATE: This equipment was delivered in 2009.

Ormskirk District General Hospital opened its new Children’s Unit in October 2004. The new facility treats children as in-patients, out-patients and day case patients. It caters for children from birth to age 16 and is a modern facility for all children in North Merseyside and West Lancashire.

The Children’s Unit is currently being modernised to offer more services, and the priority is to improve the existing High Dependency Unit to ensure more children can be treated on site. This ensures that children can receive appropriate care more quickly, and reduces the need for unnecessary transfers of seriously ill children to other hospitals in the area. We have been asked to provide an Infant Flow Driver. This is a device to aid breathing, and will be used in the Resuscitation Room to help babies with severe breathing difficulties.

At present if a child is very sick and is struggling to breathe, perhaps due to an infection, asthma or other severe illness, the baby must be ventilated in case breathing stops suddenly. This means that the baby must be sedated, and this can only be carried out in an intensive care environment at one of the big hospitals such as Manchester, Liverpool or Leeds. As well as the added risks of the hospital transfer and sedation, this situation is also more stressful for the families, who may have to travel long distances to be with the sick child.

The Infant Flow Driver is a less invasive treatment – it doesn’t provide ventilation but it does monitor breathing, and can provide a puff of oxygen to help a baby who is struggling. Most importantly it can be used in local district hospitals without Intensive Care Units. Having this life-saving device available in Ormskirk will make a massive difference to families at a very stressful time. This equipment will cost £7,510.94. We do not pay VAT on medical items.