As our supporters, beneficiaries and fundraisers, I thought you should know how the charity is approaching the coronavirus pandemic – the steps we are taking to help families; keep our services running; and to look after our staff. Here are some of the things we’re doing:
- We are liaising with the NHS and others to offer the latest guidance to families affected by congenital heart defects. We understand this is a worrying time and we are diverting as much staff time as possible to ensure we respond to queries and keep providing timely and accurate information via our website and social media channels;
- At the moment, we are continuing to visit hospitals to provide booked sonographer training sessions. However, this is a decision we are keeping under review and we have paused taking new bookings for training at this time. I suspect there will be a time when sonographer training is suspended, but we’re not there yet;
- We are reviewing other ongoing projects and, where appropriate, may delay specific pieces of new work in order to better focus our limited resources at this time;
- We’ve cancelled or postponed all other non-urgent external meetings and visits for the time being. Unfortunately, this means we will not be facilitating staff and supporter trips to hospitals or schools during this period;
- Our small team of six staff all work from home, so we are well-placed to continue most of our operations as normal. Our staff are all up to date with the latest advice and we have stopped ourselves from meeting in person for the foreseeable future. Flexible working plans have been put in place in the event of school closures and/or illness among the team. We’ll do the best that we can to look after each other, and to keep things running smoothly, basically.
- We are urgently assessing the potential impact of coronavirus on our funding, and are liaising with key funders. With mass participation events such as marathons, corporate and school fundraising activities being cancelled or postponed, we’re preparing for tough times. We are limiting non-essential spending now so that, if there is a significant drop in our income as a result of the virus, we are as well-placed as possible to continue our key operations and services.
In short, we are bracing ourselves for a big impact in the coming weeks but our priorities are to keep supporting patient families; to continue our services for health professionals; and to look after our colleagues. I’d like to personally thank you for your continued support – we don’t receive any statutory funding and, as a small charity, we don’t have very deep pockets. We may well find ourselves relying on our wonderful supporters more than ever over the coming weeks – so, thank you.
Please also be aware that these are changing times. We’ll be posting updates regularly on our social media channels which you can follow here: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Linkedin.
Most importantly of all, we’ll do whatever we can to help you. Stay safe.
Jon Arnold, Tiny Tickers Chief Executive (original blog post published 16th March 2020)
