• Westfield Health awards grant funding for overnight sleeper chairs for parents and carers
• Sleeper chairs help parents and carers to get a better quality sleep while staying with a poorly child
• First three chairs will be located on the High Dependency Unit (HDU) on the children’s ward

Westfield Health has awarded thousands of pounds’ worth of grant funding to Our Bolton NHS Charity to fund sleeper chairs for parents and carers who are staying in hospital with a poorly child.

The grant from Westfield Health’s Giving Back Committee, worth more than £3,000, will allow the charity to purchase three sleeper chairs in the High Dependency Unit (HDU), helping thousands of parents and carers every year to get a better quality sleep and support their physical and emotional resilience.

The new chairs can be positioned upright as an armchair during the day and easily converted into a bed at night for optimum comfort. The handy box space under the chair allows for valuable storage, which is otherwise not available around the bedside.

Sarah Skinner, Charity Manager at Our Bolton NHS Charity, said:

We recognise that having a poorly child in hospital is stressful for the whole family. Our aim is to make a hospital stay as comfortable as possible for parents and carers, as well as young patients, and we anticipate that around one thousand parents and carers will directly benefit from this grant in the first year alone.

“This grant is welcomed by staff who take great pride in being able to provide better quality facilities for parents, who are such an integral part of their children’s care and support.

The impacts of having a child in hospital can be wide-ranging and include:

• Physical and emotional wellbeing – sleep deprivation is shown to negatively impact emotional and immune regulation, resulting in an impaired ability to deal with emotional stressors.
• Advocacy and decision-making – parents and carers who experience poor quality sleep while staying with a child in hospital is shown to adversely affect their ability to make important decisions about their child’s care and provide emotional support and reassurance to their child.
• Financial burden – the cost of having a child in hospital in terms of lost earnings, car parking charges and expense of purchasing food from hospital food-outlets and shops.

Hope Zelly, Community Ambassador at Westfield Health, said:

At Westfield Health, we’re all about investing in health and wellbeing, and our Giving Back framework helps us to take action and support our colleagues and customers in the communities they live and work. Our colleague-led Giving Back Committee recognised the need of anyone who has a sick child in the children’s ward of the Royal Bolton Hospital, and wanted to support through the purchase of some new overnight sleeper chairs.

As part of plans to increase support for parents, in 2024 Our Bolton NHS Charity joined forces with Sophie’s Legacy and Team 1C to help alleviate the financial burden of having a child in hospital.

Sophie’s Legacy is in place at Royal Bolton Hospital to feed parents who find themselves staying in hospital while their children are being cared for.

For more information about Our Bolton NHS Charity, please visit Bolton NHS Foundation Trust’s website.