Help babies with serious heart conditions

We’re here to help babies with heart conditions – giving them a better start in life and the best possible chance for their future. Your support is helping us do that and here are just some of the things that have kept us busy since the new year:

• We are nearly finished our regional training project for 200 sonographers working across Yorkshire and the Humber. To date, we’ve trained almost 150 and we should be finished by May. Then we will be focusing on rolling this model out to the other regions and nations across the UK so keep your eyes peeled!
• We’ve launched a set of five videos that will be used by sonographers to help detect heart  defects in unborn babies. The videos each focus on a particular heart condition, and feature  expert interviews and tips; clips from scans; and an animation compare that detect with a normal fetal heart. They are available for health professionals to view free of charge on our website.
• We have been taking our message to Parliament with Tiny Tickers Chief Excecutive, Jon Arnold, and Project Support Officer, Vicky Woodmansey, taking part in a reception for MPs and Peers  held by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Heart Disease.
• And finally we have launched our new Think HEART animation which tells you the five signs to watch for that your baby has a heart condition. You can see the animation (and share it!) on the Tiny Tickers website – http://www.tinytickers.org/support-info/think-heart/

Think HEART is vital if we are to catch the 1,000 babies sent home every year from hospitals in the UK with an undetected heart condition.

Natasha gave birth to her second child, Tommy, in January 2015. Tragically his heart defect was undetected despite Tommy displaying the Think HEART signs and he passed away at 11 days old.

Natasha says “The results of Tommy’s post-mortem showed that he had a form of Transposition of the Large Ductus Arteriosus, a congenital heart defect that can be corrected with surgery. Surgery that has a 98-99% success rate if only his heart condition had been detected.

Tiny Tickers’ Think HEART campaign shows 5 signs that your baby could have a heart condition. With Tommy we could clearly see four of them – the fifth is heart rate which we didn’t know. The signs were there and if we had only known about Think HEART before, we could have saved Tommy’s life.”

Links:

• Know the signs. Read more about Think HEART and watch the video.