A signed 8″ x 10″ print of a photograph by Jack Vettriano and a signed artist’s proof of Vettriano’s painting, ‘On Parade’, made £3,000 at a charity auction to raise funds for the Ava Clarke Foundation.
All income raised at the event is to be shared between The Evelina Children’s Hospital Appeal and The Ava Clarke Foundation.
The Charities
The Ava Clarke Foundation
The Foundation was set up by Natasha and Grant Clarke in 2007 in memory of their daughter Ava. When she was first born, Ava seemed to be a perfectly healthy baby. However, after three days she stopped feeding and was transferred from the local hospital in Surrey to the Evelina Children’s Hospital in London where she was diagnosed with a severe form of a rare genetic metabolic condition called methylmalonic acidaemia (MMA). Sadly, the doctors were unable to save her and Ava died in her mother’s arms on 18 August, 2006, aged just 6 days.
Ava’s parents, Natasha and Grant Clarke, felt strongly that they wanted some good to come from her tragically short life so they set up the Foundation to help other children and families affected by life-limiting inherited genetic disorders..
The Foundation’s aims are to raise awareness and understanding of all types of genetic disorders; to provide practical support and information to families of children with life-limiting genetic disorders; and to raise money for new equipment to help in the diagnosis and treatment of children and newborn babies.
The Evelina Children’s Hospital Appeal
The Evelina Children’s Hospital (the first new children’s hospital to be built in London in 100 years) was opened on 31 October, 2005 – bringing all in-patient facilities together in one building. Prior to this children’s healthcare had been scattered across various sites at St. Thomas’ and Guy’s Hospitals. Facilities include 140 in-patient beds, including 20 intensive care beds; 3 dedicated operating theatres for children; a hospital school; and comprehensive imaging services for diagnosis and treatment. The Evelina Children’s Hospital treats 100,000 children each year – from the most deprived London Boroughs of Lambeth and Southwark to children requiring specialist care throughout the South East.
Of course, a hospital is much more than a building and the ambition is to offer the best in medical facilities but also provide a place where the wellbeing of the whole family is considered. Both the clinical and nursing staff is committed to providing the highest quality of care and also to transforming the experience of being in hospital for sick children and their families. . Already the hospital has a growing local, national and international reputation in children’s healthcare and all staff are determined to further build on and enhance its reputation for excellence and world class care over the next decade.
What Are We Raising The Money For?
The aim is to raise over £200,000 towards the cost of a piece of equipment for the Children’s Metabolic Unit at the Evelina Children’s Hospital. The equipment in question is the ‘next generation’ tandem mass spectrometer (TMS) and will be the first of its kind within the UK and within the NHS.
The new, significantly more sensitive, TMS will radically increase the range of genetic disorders that can be diagnosed on a single blood spot/sample within 10 minutes. Not only will this reduce the need for multiple samples but, more importantly, it will enable rapid and accurate diagnosis of a genetic disorder – thus enhancing the child’s chance of survival. Early treatment also has a significant impact in ensuring an entirely normal childhood growth and development.
Around 1 in 800 babies is born in the UK with a life-limiting genetic disorder with 40% of neonatal deaths caused by genetic disorders. Sadly, high sensitivity tandem mass spectrometry is only available in 1 or 2 hospitals in the UK and, therefore, the ‘next generation’ TMS will help diagnose children with potential disorders as far afield as Glasgow, Plymouth, Norwich and mainland Europe. Diagnosis is often only the start of a child’s journey as the TMS will be used to closely monitor the effectiveness of treatment throughout his/her life. In the past 10 years the current TMS machine based in the WellChild Laboratory at the Evelina Children’s Hospital has analysed nearly one million samples and is still the cornerstone of newborn screening. However, the laboratory is also a focus for diagnosis and research into other childhood diseases. It is a central analytical facility for a major international study (UK, Australia and Canada) designed to protect kidney function in adolescents with insulin dependent diabetes. This theme is continued in children with liver disease, kidney disease, sickle cell disease and brain injury. The ‘next generation’ TMS will, undoubtedly, impact very significantly in all these clinical and research areas. In the last year alone, approximately 100,000 children’s samples were analysed by TMS in the WellChild Laboratory.