INEOS has a longstanding loyalty to the community around its Lyndhurst office site near Southampton, and was delighted to contribute towards funding a world class children's emergency and trauma department at Southampton Hospital last year.
The new A&E was championed by the Southampton Hospital Charity and The Murray Parish Trust, founded by actors Sarah Parish and James Murray, who lost their daughter Ella-Jayne to a congenital heart defect in 2009. INEOS donated £500,000 to complete the couple’s £2m fundraising target, which was successfully matched by the UK Government.
After months of building, the department is now complete, providing a spacious, colourful and engaging paediatric unit quite unlike any usual hospital environment. It aims to ease anxiety and provide distraction during procedures and tests, giving children, young people, and their families privacy and dignity at a time when they may be frightened or in pain.
It also includes a spacious Outpatients Department that has been designed with the needs of children in mind, offering them a space which provides them with privacy and dignity.
This unique space now offers a specialist sedation room, an observed play area, child-adapted x-ray department, distraction equipment to help prepare children for any tests and an eight-bed short stay area for children requiring longer observation or treatment.
During the Covid-19 pandemic the unit was available to support overflow of adult patients through the most challenging weeks. INEOS Hygienics also donated 10,000 bottles of hand sanitizer to the hospital to assist with its ongoing response.