17 May 2010
It's not every day you find nurses whose job it is to care for patients who have heart problems encouraging people to eat cakes. But that's exactly what happened when Sister Mary Gray and healthcare assistant Helen Shirley - both based on the coronary care unit at Epsom Hospital - organised a massive cake-baking event earlier this year.
Mary and Helen asked as many of their colleagues as they could to bake cakes and bring them in to sell to other members of staff in the hospital as part of National Heart Month, an awareness and fund-raising initiative led by the British Heart Foundation.
And thanks to the success of the event, the coronary care team this week presented a cheque for £248 to the British Heart Foundation.
Heather Hunt is fundraiser volunteer manager for the charity. She said: "We are incredibly grateful for this donation from the coronary care unit at Epsom Hospital.
"The British Heart Foundation uses charitable donations to fund research into heart disease, as well as to help fund equipment in hospitals and specialist nurses who are experts in coronary care.
"To raise nearly £250 is a very generous amount, and a lot of people obviously volunteered their time to bake the cakes too, which is fantastic. All the hundreds raised up and down the country all add up - so far this year we've raised over £2 million from our National Heart Month initiative, a lot of that comes from events just like this."
Helen said: "I was really surprised and grateful to the sheer number of staff who helped out and baked cakes - it was tremendous. Not great for the heart, maybe, but there were low fat varieties on offer!"
John Davey is the Chair of the Trust and attended the cheque presentation. John said: "This is a genuine display of the spirit of the staff who work at our hospitals. To volunteer their own time to raise this money for the British Heart Foundation is testament to their commitment to our patients and to the wider community."
The cardiology department at Epsom and St Helier University Hospitals NHS Trust offers treatment for patients with coronary heart disease, arrhythmias (palpitations), heart failure and other heart problems. Visit www.epsom-sthelier.nhs.uk/cardiology for more information.
