New hydrotherapy pool opened at Acorns Children's Hospice Worcester
The facility will benefit over 200 children in the area
A brand new hydrotherapy pool has been opened by Acorns Children's Hospice at their facilities in Worcester.
Costing around £200,000, the new pool has multi-sensory light and sound for children with life limiting and life threatening conditions, and gives them freedom and a chance to reduce some of the pain they might be experiencing.
The hospice provides specialist palliative care in the community for children and young people, while also offering support to their families, and this facility will help more than 200 children in total.
Chief executive for Acorns Trevor Johnson is delighted with how it has turned out.
He said: "It's great that we can finally open up the doors again, and to have it back and ready to use is really special for us at Acorns.
"Our hydrotherapy pool is used for a number of different services, such as allowing families to swim together, something which they might not get chance to do at public pools, so it really is vital for so many reasons.
"We had the previous pool which was becoming increasingly hard to maintain, and we were facing a situation where we had to look at how we could continue to offer the facility moving forward, but now with this that worry has been taken away."
Funding for the project came from The Kildare Trust, who provided the hospice with a six-figure donation to do the refurbishments.
Trevor says all the support they've received throughout the process has been fantastic.
"We are incredibly grateful to The Kildare Trust for this, it's so kind and generous of them," he said.
"The difference this makes is enormous because it wasn't cheap to do all of this, and we as a hospice rely on donations, so having this support from them made it possible to carry out the work we needed to do."
Chair of The Kildare Trust Ian Smith was excited to see it all in person, and said they wanted to do everything possible to make sure this pool was up and running again quickly.
He said: "The Kildare Trust have supported Acorns for quite a few years already, and when we heard that the pool needed work doing we were keen to try and help out in anyway that we could.
"Two of the trustees visited the hospice to see and hear about what exactly needed to be done to the facility, and we were just blown away by how much of an impact it has.
"That just made it an easy decision for us to then be able to give the donation, and allow them to get everything started."
Catherine Atkins and her son Jack are just one of many families set to benefit from the re-opening of the pool.
She says the work that the hospice do in the community is brilliant, and this new facility will be such a big help.
"Since Jack was two-years-old we've been coming here," she said.
"The water gives Jack this sense of relief from any pain he's suffering, and seeing the enjoyment he has in there is just an incredible feeling.
"Apart from the hydrotherapy pool as well they've just been a tremendous support over the years, not just for Jack but for us a family on a whole, and we couldn't do it without them."
In the past year alone, the charity has cared for more than 750 children across Birmingham and the wider West Midlands, and almost 1,000 families.