Children’s Hospital charity PACT has funded a new microscope for the Hospital’s Haematology Department and hopes to see benefits for doctors, students, parents and children alike.
PACT – the Parents’ Association of Children with Tumours and Leukaemia - is a small charity working within Sheffield Children’s Hospital to support families affected by cancer or leukaemia. As well as organising family trips and running the PACT House to help keep families together through long periods of treatment, the charity also raises funds to support the medical staff working on the wards and the research staff working to beat cancer once and for all.
At £12,500, the Nikon 50i microscope PACT has funded for the Children’s Hospital doesn’t come cheap, but it does magnify blood cells by up to 1000 times. With five million cells in a cubic millimetre of blood, that’s some serious equipment, and vital in the analysis of blood samples to track the progress of illness and treatment.
Beryl Welburn is Co-ordinator for PACT. She explains: “We’ve got to fight cancer from every angle we can, and it’s important to us not just to support parents and families through their children’s illnesses, but also to support the doctors, nurses and laboratory staff working with them. Everybody here works as a team, and if we can help the Hospital get the best possible equipment, we’re helping students get the best possible training, doctors get the best possible information and ultimately children and families get the best possible care.”
The microscope will join four others in the Haematology laboratory, which processes and analyses blood samples. One person looking forward to the addition is Dr Rod Hinchliffe, who runs the lab.
He says: “For me, the main benefit of this microscope will be the scope to teach groups of students with the most accurate and high quality images available. Usually teaching with a microscope has to be on a one to one basis with teacher and student constantly switching round to view the images. This model has a digital camera attached and we can project the image onto a larger screen. That means that more people can see the images in more detail. The better the picture the easier and quicker it will be for all staff to learn how to recognise and diagnose different blood abnormalities.
“With leukaemias and lymphomas timing can be critical, but more importantly if you’re a parent waiting for news, any delay is agonising. Our aim is to provide a quick and most of all accurate service for doctors, parents and patients, and this microscope will help us continue to do so.”
Beryl concluded: “I’m delighted we’ve been able to make morphology – the analysis of blood cells – larger than life for the laboratory staff and students! This is one of the best teaching hospitals in the country, and it’s great that PACT has been able to make a contribution to that work.”
Notes to Editors