Parent Bags for the Special Care Baby Unit at WCH
We are thrilled to launch something new today!! We are now supporting the SCBU at West Cumberland Hospital with our fantastic new Parent Support Bags! This project has been in the planning for almost a year and thanks to the support of lots of amazing people we have finally donated the first batch of bags to the team today!!
Each family that is admitted to the unit with their baby will receive one of the bags, which we hope will help the families a great deal. Each bag includes:
A pair of Miniboos (thank you to Cuski for their support and personalisation!)
These are incredible little things. Made from bamboo they are specially designed for premature babies in incubators. One of the miniboos stays with baby, the other is with mum, put inside her top. Every few hours the miniboos are swapped. This means baby can smell mum, and mum can smell baby. Not only is this incredibly comforting to the baby, but it helps to stimulate the production of mums milk. Then, mum can express milk (using the machine we donated to the ward a while ago!) and the baby can be fed from their mum! Amazing!!
A Team Evie water bottle
The staff will continually tell mum to drink pletny of water while she is expressing milk, so we thought having a bottle on hand would help!
A Jomanda Sheep (thank you to Jomanda for their support!)
A beautiful cuddly lamb, perfect for being held by tiny fingers, and a fitting animal due to Evie’s best cuddly friend being a lamb!
A pair of premature baby socks (thanks to Babyprem for their support!)
One thing a parent preparing for their child’s birth will not be ready for if their child is born early is how tiny their feet are! We have included a couple of pairs of tiny socks so the babies can have lovely toasty feet!
A Team Evie notebook
We know from our experience how handy having a pen and paper available is when you are in hospital with your child. Writing endless lists and writing down what you want to ask the doctor…hopefully having the notepad will reduce a little of the stress…
Thank you so much to Story Homes and Sellafield Ltd for their financial support of the project, we couldn’t have got this off the ground without your help!!
We hope the bags prove to be a huge help to families on SCBU, we are sure the parents will appreciate the contents as we would have loved to have got one of the bags when Evie was born!
