Multi gold medal Paralympian Kurt Fearnley crosses the line in first place in last year’s Balmoral Burn wheelchair race (Picture Michael Amendolia)
Right now in scores of hospitals around Australia there are an estimated 4000 children under the age of 16 being treated for illness or injury ranging from the most serious and life threatening to less minor conditions that are fully treatable though just as frightening for concerned families.
That’s a lot of kids requiring a lot of state-of-the-art medical attention from teams of highly skilled doctors and nurses. But there’s something that many Australians don’t know.
We live, for the most part, easygoing lives in a first world country free of disease and malnutrition and with an abundance of safe, clean water, all of which is supported by a tax-payer funded and Federally subsidised Medicare system.
Sounds good, right? Well, maybe not good enough. As the founder and CEO of the Humpty Dumpty children’s charity Paul Francis points out, often our respected doctors and nurses simply do not have the right medical equipment to save our children’s lives – even relatively inexpensive pieces. I’ll come back to this in a moment.
Other times they don’t have the technologically advanced medical machinery to allow them to do their jobs to the best of their ability. They could be hamstrung by out-dated equipment or hobbled by budget restraints and tight government funding, both federal and state. It’s like flying a jumbo jet on one engine: doable, but extremely difficult.
The medical teams at our most sophisticated children’s hospitals around Australia confront these realities daily and routinely call on Humpty Dumpty for assistance. The doctors know that funds are finite and priorities often mean small things like stethoscopes are overlooked. Yes, really, stethoscopes! And that’s before we mention the big-ticket items like a $164,000 newborn and paediatric emergency transport ambulance, or incubators, or bladder scanners, or ventilators or warmed cots.
That’s why this Sunday at 9am up to 10,000 people will join forces in the Sydney suburb of Balmoral to take part in a community-wide fun run organised by Australian rugby legend Phil Kearns and the kids’ charity. UPDATE: The Burn raised a record $3million-plus over the last weekend.
There are 20 categories of races in the Balmoral Burn which cover the 420metres up the “heartbreak hill” portion of Awaba Street in Balmoral including individual and team events, schools and corporate races, and the exciting Para Burn for wheelchair athletes (including two of Australia’s Paralympians for the London Olympics) and an uplifting race for people with special needs called the Special Burn. You can even take on the hill with your pets or babies in prams.
The 12th annual Balmoral Burn hopes to raise at least $2million to buy essential medical equipment for 178 children’s wards and hospitals around Australia.You can see Humpty’s medical ‘wish list’ here
When I first got involved with Humpty as a volunteer in 2004 the foundation supported one hospital in Sydney. That year the charity raised $1.3million and its generous donors bought dozens of pieces of equipment for the children’s ward at the Royal North Shore Hospital.
Humpty’s founder, Paul Francis, OAM, started the charity eight years earlier in 1996, and by 2011 it supported 178 hospitals here and one medical clinic for the poverty stricken children in Timor Leste where 64 out of every 1000 children die before their 5th birthday, according to the country’s Demographic and Health survey released in 2010.
Since 2004, thousands of Australians have helped raise $25.38million for Humpty. They see the extraordinary need and merit. Every dollar donated to buy a piece of equipment goes directly to that piece of equipment. Each piece bears Humpty’s purple and yellow logo, and the name of the person who bought it should they wish to be so acknowledged.
As the media ambassador for the charity and the editor of the two Good Egg magazines we publish each year, I have spoken to mums and dads whose children have directly benefited from Humpty equipment. It’s often excruciatingly heartbreaking to hear their stories but they tell me their kids would not be alive without the generosity of those great people that Humpty calls its Good Eggs.
But not all the stories have happy endings.
Which brings me back to the point I mentioned earlier about a child dying because a hospital didn’t have the right equipment to save a treasured life. In 2008 a paediatric nurse stood in front of the 400 guests at the Balmoral Burn sponsors’ dinner and told how a three-year-old girl had died in a nurse’s arms because the hospital in which she was being treated did not have a relatively inexpensive but life saving piece of medical equipment.
It was a shocking revelation. Remember, this is Australia.
The toddler’s condition, the nurse said, made it impossible to get intra-venous access and staff could not administer life-saving fluids and drugs in critical time.
As she spoke, the room fell silent and people wept for the tragic and unnecessary loss of a small child’s life. The nurse made a solemn promise to herself that it would never happen again in any hospital in which she worked, and she contacted Humpty to ask for help.
So what was this miraculous piece of medical equipment? The paediatric nurse held up the awkward sounding Ezy Intra-Osseous access kit (EZIO) and showed how it worked. Essentially, it’s a tiny, hand-held drill with a needle attached that allows trained medical staff to administer resuscitative fluids and medications via a bone when a tiny vein cannot be found for an intravenous drip.
Cost? Back then, $3160.
Nine EZIOs were on the Balmoral Burn wish in 2008, all requested by rural hospitals like the one in which the little girl had died.
It went unsaid that night in 2008, but most of us in that marquee on Balmoral beach were haunted by one thing. What price a child’s life – and in our so-called lucky country?
Within minutes of the nurse’s poignant speech, all nine EZIOs were bought. Within weeks, they were delivered to hospitals across the country, and within days, children’s lives were being saved.
In the four years since, Humpty’s generous donors have bought another 183 EZIO kits. And the wish list is not exhausted.
“It is impossible to know how many lives have been saved by the EZIO, but if it is only one, then that is worth it,” says Humpty’s founder and CEO, Paul Francis.
To participate in the Balmoral Burn fun run on Sunday register at the bottom of Awaba Street in Balmoral at 8am. Races start at 9am. For more information on how you can help The Humpty Dumpty Foundation go to the website.
