Tail-wagging visitors here for another year
Members of the Chevrolet Car Club – South West Region and students at Warrnambool’s St Pius X School have each donated $500 to bring the much-loved Delta Society’s therapy dogs to our Warrnambool Base Hospital for another year.
Not only do pets bring joy to the lives of more than 12 million Australians, there’s plenty of evidence to show they’re also great for your health and wellbeing. Their beneficial effects range across the full human life span: enhanced social skills in childhood; reduction and better management of hypertension, heart attacks and strokes; and improved mental health and wellbeing in the frail aged. That’s why South West Healthcare loves having them around.
The Chevrolet Car Club’s donation ensures weekly visits to patients in the hospital’s new Medical/Palliative Care Unit while the St Pius X School donation ensures the same for children in the new Paediatric Unit. (Both units are part of the region’s new $115M Warrnambool Base Hospital, officially opened by Premier Ted Baillieu in September.)
Since 2005, the Chevrolet Car Club has donated $8,385 to South West Healthcare for otherwise unaffordable medical equipment. Its annual car show, held at the finish line of October’s 262K Melbourne to Warrnambool Cycling Classic, has helped pay for lifesaving hotlines and a biers block machine for our Emergency Department, a jaundice meter for our Midwifery Unit, our Podiatry Unit’s first-ever orthotics software package and a pair of cystourethroscopes for our Operating Theatres. Last year it also became our first-ever online donor, contributing $1,500 towards the new Base Hospital’s $377,000 Special Care Nursery Appeal.
This time around, its $1,280 (Christmas-time) donation has also seen to the end of the hospital’s $6,626 Dialysis Defibrillator Appeal while the remainder of St Pius’s $1,007.30 gift has been put towards the $17,850 needed to replace a pair of outdated Paediatric Unit Vital Signs Monitors. That appeal total currently sits at $2,744.