HIKING A whopping 16 miles across Saddleworth’s peaks is no small feat for anybody – least of all the critical care workers raising money for the NHS.
Advanced critical care practitioner Sarah Penkett and intensive care research nurse Paul Gill will be among the team taking on Saddleworth’s Four Meres Challenge on Sunday (12 July), in aid of the Tameside and Glossop NHS Charity.
“We do try to do quite a bit of fundraising for our unit,” Sarah says. “So we thought we’d do a sponsored walk because it’s summertime.
“I live in Uppermill, so I thought because people do the London Marathon, the Manchester Marathon, maybe the Three Peaks, we could do something a little more local, but still challenging. So, we decided to go for the Four Meres Walk.”
It will see the team take on the ancient quarters of Friarmere, Shawmere, Lordsmere, and Quickmere as they go mile for mile through Saddleworth’s historic countryside.
Almost two decades after they themselves started at the trust, the pair hope the walk will raise vital funds towards patient care and cutting medical research.
“I was a nurse for not quite twenty years, but not far off,” Paul says. “And then Sarah, in 2020, brought in some research to the unit, and that was a success. So now we’ve gone from that one trial to multiple research studies, and we’ve been a national leader on a couple of the studies – for a small little hospital, we’re doing really well.”
A particular focus for the pair will be to research into pulmonary embolisms, or “clotting of the lung,” as Paul explains. Their previous fundraisers raised money for new equipment – the Four Meres Challenge will now fund the research that follows.
“When they’re very unstable, they sometimes need to go for a scan, and we have to decide if they are well enough for the scan or, if not, whether we should treat what we think is a pulmonary embolism.
“[The equipment] is non-invasive, it’s a little belt that wraps around the chest and shows us how the lungs are functioning in real time, perfusing the blood and ventilating with air, and that that could potentially guide us in our treatment. But we need the evidence to say that it does that, hence the trial.”
What money doesn’t go into medical trials will instead be used for more direct forms of patient care, particularly those on end of life treatment.
“We’ve been looking at something called a cuddle bed, which is effectively a double hospital bed,” Sarah says. “It can be a single, but then when you’ve got our end of life patients, patients who are potentially going for organ donation, it’s quite an emotionally challenging time for relatives. And sometimes, they just want to get on the bed with them.
“This kind of bed would help support that, because there’d be enough space for all our equipment, but also space for somebody to be with them.”
The Four Meres Challenge is the latest in a long line of fundraising activities by the team, including a now-yearly Critical Care Comedy Night in Stalybridge. According to Sarah and Paul however, the Four Meres Challenge looks to be their most monumental effort yet.
“We’re definitely going to finish it,” Paul says, “but Sarah might finish it carrying me, because we have said it’s going to be like the last scenes of Lord of the Rings: a pair of hobbits dragging me up Mount Doom!”
Sarah continues: “I’ve been practicing. I’ve done from Diggle to Denshaw and took my 11-year-old with me, and she managed it. I’m doing that bit of Sunday practice, mapping my routes out, so I think we’ll be okay.
“The one thing we are we are trying to put out there is the success of how research-active the unit is. The hospital’s had a research team for many years and there’s lots of trials going on around the hospital. Intensive Care’s activity around research is fairly new.
“Our aim is that the care patients are getting is the most up to date, and that people should be offered the opportunity to be involved in research. Any hospital that does research has good outcomes, the stats suggest. We want the public to know that it’s a serious unit that is taking its care seriously, so the community gets the best care it can get.”
The Four Meres Challenge is set to start at 8:30am on 12 July. The team has so far raised £410 out of their £1,000 target, with their JustGiving page available here.
You must be logged in to post a comment.