How Does  Martha Care Hope to do This?

Martha Care’s main aim is to provide a child & families social work counsellor who will provide much needed support and advice to families.  This advice could relate to difficulties around the financial aspect of living a long way from home, housing issues, making contact with home-based support services before you leave the hospital, contacting other families for additional support & advice, how other children are affected, how extended family members are affected, managing work & benefits and lots of other problems spending long periods in hospital bring to families.

In addition they will also contribute to the physical comforts for parents and families by ensuring that the rooms are well cared for and basic supplies are available. 

We aim to provide some basic necessities too.  Families have to go into hospital immediately with no chance to collect up items for what can sometimes be a very lengthy stay.  Yet life still goes on; bills have to be paid, siblings educated, work commitments re-arranged.  Access to a phone & internet would help parents stay in touch with extended family & their community.

We want to provide some home comforts, TVs in every parents room, double beds, tea & coffee making facilities, meal & car parking vouchers. 

Alongside this, parents also need advice and support from someone on the ward who can listen and advise them and has the time to do so.  The Martha Care social worker will also contact home agencies like social services, mobility services, voluntary agencies so that when the child is discharged parents will have as much support as is available once they get home. 

Martha Care now has enough money in the bank to pay for a social worker to work on the ward for a short period of time, but not enough to guarantee the service continues longer than the next 6 months.  Our next task is to recruit this social worker onto the ward and begin to support families.  But, we need help to keep this service going.
Without your support families in distress won’t have the help they urgently need

Please support us to keep this service helping out families by completing the direct contribution form or visiting our fundraising page (Link) and organising a fundraising event in your local area.

Read about Martha’s experiences at Frenchay here(link to www.martha-mickshik.memory-of.com)