News story
21 December 2023
ACT supporters have donated and pledged an astonishing £31.7m of the £56m raised so far – helping to take the campaign well past the halfway point of the £100m target.
Thanks to these generous ACT supporters, the campaign to build a ground-breaking children’s hospital in Cambridge – the first hospital truly designed to bring together the treatment of mental and physical health – has taken a significant step forward. With an embedded University of Cambridge research institute, the new children’s hospital is expected to have a regional, national and global impact.
The news of the fundraising milestone comes soon after the project’s Outline Business Case was given approval in principle by the government. As a result, pre-construction works are due to begin on the site of the new hospital early in 2024, with full construction due to start as early as 2025.
Dame Mary Archer, President of Addenbrooke’s Charitable Trust and Co-Chair of the Cambridge Children’s Hospital Fundraising Campaign, said:
“Our grateful thanks to all the amazing donors and supporters for their vision and generosity, which have brought us to this important campaign milestone. We still have a long way to go but I am just delighted for everyone who has been championing this project over the last few years that we are now at this exciting point. Cambridge Children’s Hospital has been a long time in the making, so this is a huge moment for the 1.5 million children and young people in our region.”
Cambridge Children’s Hospital will be the first specialist children’s hospital for the East of England, the only NHS region without one. It will also be the first hospital truly designed to treat mental and physical health together, with integrated wards, single occupancy bedrooms, access to gardens and terraces, and a school.
The hospital will be a national exemplar, delivering game-changing advances in life sciences research via the six research centres in the Cambridge Children’s Research Institute. Focusing on early detection and preventative medicine, the hospital will detect disease early or prevent it altogether, personalise health care and deliver it closer to home for children and young people across the East of England.
The new hospital will be built on the Cambridge Biomedical Campus, at the heart of Europe’s largest life-sciences cluster. The unique density and co-location of research institutes, industry and health care delivery here will enable collaborations that ensure discoveries made at the research institute will transform diagnosis and become routine treatments for young patients in years to come.
As the campaign passes the halfway mark we will now look ahead towards the next phase, where there will be more opportunity for people who want to support this campaign to get involved with fundraising, donating, and volunteering to help make this new hospital a reality – we’ll be more sharing more details about how you can get involved soon.
Launched just two years ago, the fundraising campaign is a partnership between Addenbrooke’s Charitable Trust (ACT), as well as Head to Toe Charity and the University of Cambridge.
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