Equipment & infrastructure
Diagnostic rooms
The Raisa Gorbachev Foundation works with leading centres helping to fund essential equipment needed to care for young patients suffering from cancer.
The initial priority was to provide and improve essential facilities, infrastructure and equipment for the treatment of children with life-threatening conditions. The Foundation was instrumental in furnishing Russia’s first dedicated unit (Raisa Gorbachev Memorial Institute) with equipment, beds and further resources. Grants have enabled new screening technology to be purchased, giving doctors the ability to analyse, diagnose and treat patients with accuracy formerly unavailable at the centres. Laborious and painful transfusions can now be carried out more efficiently and with more comfort to the patients.
The Foundation has provided State of the art diagnostic equipment at the paediatric oncology centre in Moscow. This means early and unobtrusive detection as well focussed treatment is now available – this has made a real difference. An example of this is the Phillips CT Technology Brilliance scanner. The CT scanner gives Russian doctors at this institute unprecedented access to diagnostic equipment that can correctly diagnose the spread of a tumour and evaluate the metastatic disease. Before this most patients treated at the institute were unable to have such an evaluation, as the old equipment delivered too much radiation to the young patients.
Essential equipment
The Raisa Gorbachev Foundation has provided our institutional partners with many key pieces of equipment which are vital to the treatment of patients. New automated machinery has replaced out-dated and intrusive equipment, providing quicker and more accurate results, allowing doctors to see more patients every day.
At the Paediatric Cancer Unit Blokhin Hospital, the Foundation has provided diagnostic tools, including ultrasound systems and a CT scanner.
Deputy Director Dr Georgii Lyudomirovich Mentkevich says: “Around 50,000 images were taken during one year from the equipment donated by RGF. But what is really important is the quality. The quality has improved.”
Family Rooms
Through funding raised at the Raisa Gorbachev Midsummer Galas, Marie Curie has been able to build, renovate and furnish several rooms at Marie Curie hospices. These include building a new family room at the Solihull Hospice. These warm, welcoming spaces are used by both hospice counsellors and by patients, their families and children. Bereavement counsellors spend time here with young people being cared for at the hospice and with well children during the process of a loved one’s terminal illness.
