Sunnybrook NICU Campaign

We Need Your Help Please.

A few months ago, one of our team had the luxury of watching the nurses and doctors at the Sunnybrook Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (currently housed at Women’s College Hospital) save their son’s life. The nurses are as professional as any Marine Corps company, and the doctors come from around the world to train there. As a Level 3 ICU, it is one of just 5 in all of Ontario, serving familes from across Ontario. And they are good. It is no small feat, either, as the Sunnybrook/WCH NICU has 36 babies couped up in what looks to be about 2,000 square feet of space. Including isolettes, equipment, desks and family space.

In the wake of that experience, we decided that we would address the primary equipment need of the NICU unit: a nenonatal echocardiography imaging system (a GE cardiac ultrasound to the layman). Despite having the staff budget to hire a professional to operate the system, the NICU doesn’t have the capital budget to acquire the system.

What does this heart ultrasound do? Simply put, it would replace an analog system that currently generates a report that might take 3 days to be read by a cardiac specialist from The Hospital for Sick Children. With the new digital system, it might be read in a few hours.

If your newborn had a choice between having their heart ultrasound read in a few hours or three days, which would you choose? Particularly if they were only a few hours old and the clinical picture was murky.

So, for just under $200,000, we – us – can get a machine that uses the latest technology to help save the lives of babies that are just a few hours or days old. And as a firm that helps finance the development of new software and hardware to modernize the way we all work and live, among other things, it seems quite apropos. We are kicking it off, but we need the support of the community to help it come to pass.

In December, our firm announced that all of the revenue we generated from our portfolio and our fund’s management fees on Dec,. 12, 2006 would be donated to local and national charities. Part of those funds will be donated to this effort, and will serve as a lead donation. My wife and I will personally provide the other lead donation.

If you feel so inclined, we’d so very much appreciate it if you would support the campaign; the link to donate is here, and if that doesn’t work it is at the top of the blog and our home website. To think that the 25 or so NICU healthcare professionals working this very minute at 76 Grenville Street are without a simple tool to help save a babies’ life….

For all that we can’t fix in the world, or that is out of our hands, this is so achievable.

MRM