Help babies with serious heart conditions

As you have very generously supported us in the past, we wanted to get in touch to let you know how we are approaching the coronavirus pandemic - the steps we are taking to help families; keep our services running; and to look after our staff.

Firstly these are very uncertain times for everyone. We are bracing ourselves for a big impact in the coming weeks but our priorities are to keep supporting patient families; to continue our services for health professionals; and to look after our colleagues. It will only be through the generosity of our supporters and donors, like you, that our services will keep running.

Even though we are facing a huge public health emergency, a baby will still be born with a serious heart condition every 2 hours. That fact remains. As does the fact that we will now need to do even more to protect them, their families, and the health professionals that look after them, over the coming weeks and months.

Here are some of the things we’re doing:

• We are liaising with the NHS and others to offer the latest guidance to families affected by congenital heart defects. We understand this is a worrying time and we are diverting as much staff time as possible to ensure we respond to queries and keep providing timely and accurate information via our website and social media channels;

• Following the latest Government advice, we have decided to suspend all face-to-face sonographer training for the foreseeable future. Our online training resources remain available and we will add to these in the coming weeks. Our medical staff may also be deployed into the NHS during the next few weeks - and we support this completely. We stand by all NHS staff at this difficult time and send them our very best wishes as they work selflessly and tirelessly on behalf of the public.

• We’ve cancelled or postponed all other non-urgent external meetings and visits for the time being. Unfortunately, this means we will not be facilitating staff and supporter trips to hospitals or schools during this period;

• Our small team of six staff all work from home, so we are well-placed to continue most of our operations as normal. Our staff are all up to date with the latest advice and we have stopped ourselves from meeting in person for the foreseeable future. Flexible working plans have been put in place in the event of school closures and/or illness among the team. We’ll do the best that we can to look after each other, and to keep things running smoothly, basically.