The IOW NHS Trust’s Community Heart Failure Team were overwhelmed to receive a fantastic donation of three thousand five hundred pounds from Osborne Masonic lodge.
This incredibly generous donation has been put to great use in purchasing two portable ECG machine’s and three stethoscopes.
The team care for 18+ year olds with a diagnosis of heart failure. Some people are seen within St Mary’s Hospital and others are within the community.
An electrocardiogram (ECG) is a simple test that can be used to check your heart’s rhythm and electrical activity.
Sensors attached to the skin are used to detect the electrical signals produced by the heart each time it beats. These signals are recorded by a machine and help diagnose and monitor conditions affecting the heart.
Stethoscopes are used to listen for and identify specific heart sounds such as clicks, murmurs and rubs. The newly purchased cardiology specialist Littmanns stethoscopes are a lot more receptive to sound, which makes listening to cardiac sounds much clearer.
Having two additional ECG machines will be incredibly useful and will reduce the time it takes to moving equipment between the various locations where patients can be treated.
Georgina Newnham, Community Heart Failure Nurse Specialist added “We would like to say an overwhelming thank you very much. To us it means that we can improve quality of care for our patients, it means we can avoid delaying any treatments and this money has benefitted the whole of the island’s heart failure patients. So, it’s not just one or two, it’s all of them. They raised it over a time and through the pandemic, so it’s been remarkable!
Dianne Kettel, Community Heart Failure Nurse Specialist said “It has made a huge difference to my community patients because I have an ECG machine that I can take into the clinic and do a timely ECG as needed. In the past, I would have had to book patients in for another clinic appt to do the ECG which could have been a few days wait, so it has made a big difference to get an ECG done in a timely manner in the first clinic appt with my patients.”
Michael Lloyd, Member of Osborne Masonic Lodge said “I am a member of Osborne Lodge, here in East Cowes. I was the charity steward at the time of the we made the donation. Several of our members have benefited from the services of this lovely team and the cardiac department at St Mary’s Hospital, and all of us know someone who has. We felt that they provided such a wonderful service and have helped our members to get back on their feet and active again, so we thought that we ought to make some sort of contribution. We asked what they would like, and we were told that what they would dearly love is two ECG machine and 3 stethoscopes. So that’s what we did”.
Anthony Newnham, Current Master of Osborne Masonic Lodge added “I am the current master of Osborne Lodge and one of the prime movers for Masons generally is charity in raising money.
“We raised the money mainly through functions and raffles, but also from generous donations from members. I think that it is an important thing, because when masons raise money, they do so from their own pockets and not from any organisational enterprise.
“We raise the money and it’s then given by members to a worthy cause, like this one. We have members who have benefited directly from this service and once we outlined what we wanted to do to raise money – everyone automatically saw it as a great idea, recognising that it’s a small team on the Island and that the demographic on the island meant this problem will grow and not lessen, so any little thing we could do to help was good, and this was one of those things”.
