Helping Parents

The Charity Evie's Gift was born out of tragedy. Our daughter Evie was 13 years old when she died, taken from us by an aggressive brain tumour. Following her diagnosis while on holiday in Spain, she was airlifted home and admitted to Bristol Children's Hospital, where she received the best care possible from a group of dedicated doctors and nurses. Evie spent 9 days in paediatric intensive care and a further 3 weeks on the high dependency unit. During that time, we were fortunate enough to be accommodated in the hospital's bunk rooms on the 6th floor for 4 nights, and then at Ronald McDonald House for the remainder of our time there.

But others weren't so lucky and too often we saw frightened, tired parents sleeping on chairs in the Parents' Room/Kitchen or even sleeping in their cars because they couldn't afford the local hotels. Having your child admitted to hospital with a life threatening condition is bad enough, but having to face tough medical decisions when sleep-deprived is a dreadful situation to face. The free accommodation, where available, is fantastic, but there isn't enough to go around as we saw all too often.

So when our daughter died, we decided to do something about it and tackle that, and other problems, head on. Evie's Gift has two main aims: to give immediate financial assistance to parents whose children have been admitted to hospital with a life threatening or life limiting condition, and to fund research into the rare brain cancer that took her from us too soon.

We will aim to pay for 2 nights' accommodation locally and help meet other costs associated with being near your child while they are in hospital. That's things like food and travel costs. We can't cover everything, but we can take away some of the worry for a couple of days, allowing stressed out parents to think straight and get some quality rest.