Tuesdays After The Christmas Break
After our Christmas break we resumed our meetings with a social evening. This gave members a chance to catch up and enjoy an evening together. Thank you to Betty for providing a quiz and to everyone who generously donated to our Bring & Buy table.
Our next meeting was a talk by Lyn Howell about the charity LATCH. This charity was set up in 1982 in Llandough Hospital and although the acronym Landough Aims to Treat Children with cancer with Hope is not as appropriate as it was the charity still carries on the fantastic job of supporting children and their families who are being treated by the Oncology Unit at The Children’s Hospital of Wales.
Latch famously provided accommodation for families at Llandough so that families could stay together during their child’s stay in hospital. In 1992 this was relocated to the children’s unit at UHW.
As well as this support for parents Latch also provides essential equipment such as CT Scanners. Other services provided are Social Workers who can provide practical, emotional and financial support to families at a very difficult time.
In order to provide its comprehensive range of services Latch needs some £700,000 per annum to cover the cost of supporting families. This charity has no paid fundraisers and they rely heavily on the hard work of volunteers and are very proud of the fact that they have one of the lowest management expenses for a charity in the whole of the UK.
One of the most recent innovations was the installation of a patient controlled interactive lighting system. This has enabled children to have scans without an anesthetic as they can control various display screens to watch while in the scanner and this serves to relax them and so makes a frightening procedure more acceptable.
Lyn spoke from the heart when telling us about the work of the charity as his daughter died from leukaemia at a very early age. We were shown a series of photos of her before and after treatment and I don’t think there was a dry face in the audience. It
is through the work of this local charity that survival rates for childhood leukaemias are improving all the time and although there are so many charities out there that need our support this local charity should get support