NewStart

The Wythenshawe Hospital Transplant Fund (commonly known as New Heart-New Start) is a charity which was set up to provide financial assistance to the heart and lung transplantation programme and future clinical developments in heart and lung surgery at Wythenshawe Hospital – that was over 20 years ago!

Since then the charity has raised over £7m from donations made by patients, support groups, associations, clubs, individuals, commerce and industry and this has helped to:

• Funding the first 50 transplants
• Providing one third of the cost of building the transplant centre
• Building four bungalows for accommodation of transplant patients prior to returning home
• Building and equipping the Transplant Laboratory
• Funding the Laboratory for three years
• Financing the building of £1.9 million Jim Quick Transplant Ward and six bedsits
• Providing new furniture and beds for the Jim Quick Ward

Artificial Hearts

The main problem with heart transplants is the shortage of donors and the difficulty of finding donors when they are most needed.  Regretfully, a sizeable number of patients die before a suitable heart becomes available or they become unstable very quickly. For these patients, in particular, the availability of mechanical hearts is truly life saving.  With the support of the Charity, Mr Nizar Yonan (The Director of Transplants) along with a fully trained team of surgeons, physicians, technicians and nurses has been able to offer this life saving facility to patients at the transplant unit in Wythenshawe Hospital since 2006.  The programme has now been granted government funding to carry on.

The Million Pound Challenge

Our challenge was to raise £1,000,000 to fund the purchase of a Cardiac Magnetic Resonance Scanner (CMRS) which took us two years to do. The machine was is now fully operational and housed in the North West Heart Centre building opened by Prince Anne in May 2008   It is the only dedicated Cardiac scanner in the North West. 

Ex Vivo Lung programme

This is a programme where lungs can be thoroughly assessed outside the body and then passed as suitable for transplantation to help reduced the number of patients on the waiting list.  The Charity has provided funding of £90,000 to provide training, set up and equipment for the programme to go ahead.  We have now done three very successful lung transplant operations using this method.  The first of its kind to be done outside of Sweden where the technique was pioneered by Professor Stig Steen.

Transplantation could not exist without organ donation and whenever we can we try to raise the profile of this as without donors, transplantation could not go ahead.  There is always a shortage of donors as it is something most people want to do but never quite get round to doing it.  Please sign up - it does save lives!