Medical equipment used at Great Ormond Street Hospital (video transcript)

In our video about where your money goes when you donate to Great Ormond Street Hospital Children's Charity, Professor Martin Elliot explains what specialist medical equipment your donations have helped to buy. A video transcript is below. Watch the video on YouTube and find out more about what your donations help fund.

“My name is Martin Elliot, I’m a Paediatric Heart and Lung Surgeon and I’m one of the Medical Directors here at Great Ormond Street.

“Great Ormond Street’s mission is to care for children. We want to do that by emphasising our motto really which is ‘the child first and always’. That’s always been at the core of what we do – we’re completely committed to providing the best possible care we can for children and by extension for their families.”

“In Great Ormond Street there are many children having lots of things which are potentially frightening. If it wasn’t for the play therapists who take the children through very difficult tasks – even a simple thing like having a drip or putting a needle into them – these children are going to have to come back more than once, so we really don’t want them to acquire a fear of hospitals and the play therapists help them realise it’s part of their treatment and not be frightened of it.

“They do an amazing job.”

“When people have heart or lung disease we really need to be able to make a good diagnosis and then, if they have treatment, to follow them up to make sure we’re doing all the right things for them.

“One of the best ways of doing that is to have an exercise machine that allows us to do a sort of standard amount of exercise and see how the heart and lungs respond to that. The team rely on this information to do the right treatment and to make sure that the children are recovering fast enough.”

“When you do a variety of operations on children you really need to be able to check that you’ve done it well enough and not bring the child back for a second operation later.

“So what we’re looking for here is a thing called an image intensifier which will allow us to take images of the child in the operating theatre, when everybody’s all dressed up in their surgical clothes like this, to deliver these pictures quickly as possible in real time.”

"If your child comes into hospital, you want to share that experience with them and not have them frightened. Being in a private room, with en-suite facilities allows you a bit of privacy and creates that cocoon of care that they really need.

"Also if there are infections, we can isolate children from one another so that reduces the spread of infections. Privacy and the ability to have a private space is really crucial to how we do this work."

“The work we do isn’t possible without your generosity. The children we look after, their families, rely on all of our equipment and all of the skills that we are able to pull together. But they – for comfort and for excellence – they need what we’ve provided which is great facilities, great equipment and a much better ability to deliver high-quality care and give us a chance to make things better for the next generation of children.

“The ones I’ve treated over my life will undoubtedly be grateful for what you’ve done – I know that, they’ve said so – and I expect the next lot of children as they grow up will be just as grateful, so thank you very much.”