After a lovely holiday in Madeira where the sun shone all the time I returned to rain rain rain and then fog and frost. What a wake-up call.
Friends have been busy wrapping 700 Christmas gifts for all the Adult In-Patients on Christmas Day and 120 gifts for the Elderly In-patients and about 20 Gifts for the Newborns. A mammoth task alongside greatly increased sales in the shop and very busy Tea Bars as patients are seen before the Christmas break.
We have teams of volunteers giving out the 700 presents to the Adults on Christmas Eve. The Elderly have their gifts put under the tree in each ward and a Doctor plays Father Christmas in the PAH and gives out their presents on Christmas Day.
Thank you to all the teams who make this possible each year. Much work behind the scenes enables this to take place over the Christmas Break to delight and surprise all the In-patients.
We do not do anything for the Childrens' wards as they always receive a lot of gifts from various charities and other ventures from all over the area, including lovely gifts given personally to the children from the entire Saints team including George Burley this year. A really exciting event for the sick children.
We also gave the Elderly wards 20 tv/dvd players so that they may watch dvd films. The money for this was gifted to us by a lady whose Mother had been an In-patient on G level for a number of weeks. She felt that they should be able to watch dvds as they are unable to have Patientline television on that level in the hospital and the FriendsSGH had to have all our tvs removed as part of the Patientline lease.
We hope that they will enjoy watching films as and when they wish. A library of dvds is already available and we will try to collect a lot more so that the Elderly have a great choice of viewing at their leisure.
We have now been given the building timetable for the F level Refreshment Area and it will not be handed over to us until the end of July07. Very disappointing for us but as usual we will grin and carry on D level until then.
The long service awards took place in the Chapel on 5th December with the Mayor and Mayoress of Southampton and the Chairman of the Trust, Mr Richard Keightley CB, handing the badges and citations to the many volunteers who have completed between 5-20 years service.
This year Reg Lowman, who completed 27 years as Chairman of the League of Friends and has been President for 3 year since standing down as Chairman, completed a staggering 50 years as a volunteer for the FriendsSGH. 50 years of volunteering. what an amazing feat. He was presented with an inscribed crystal decanter by the Trust Chairman and congratulated by the Mayor.
We are going to do a small buffet later in the Spring for our own celebration of his Golden Award.
Happy Christmas to all our Volunteers and to you all.