Starlight Children's Foundation
The Starlight Children's Foundation brightens the lives of seriously and terminally ill children by granting their wishes and providing hospital entertainment to help take their minds off the pain, fear and isolation of their illness.
The Foundation's work includes providing Starlight Fun Centres - specially designed mobile entertainment units incorporating a TV monitor, a combination video/DVD player and a Nintendo GameCube® – which can bring more smiles and dry more eyes than any medicine on offer. Starlight Fun Centres can be used in many different ways:
- Children on the ward can all sit together and watch a film, breaking the 'first day at school' atmosphere and encouraging the children to make friends. =
- A Fun Centre can be wheeled right up to a child’s bed in intensive care, providing entertainment whilst isolated from others.
- They can be used to help calm children down prior to an important operation or following an accident.
Children who have access to a Starlight Fun Centre whilst undergoing treatment are often so absorbed playing their Nintendo game that they are unaware of the treatment being administered to them. Children who enter A&E units, traumatised, frightened and in pain, begin to relax and are distracted from their pain without strong medication.
Starlight aims to put a Starlight Fun Centre, which costs £3,000 to sponsor, on every children's ward and in every hospice across the UK. So far over 823 Starlight Fun Centres have been distributed across the United Kingdom.
The Discworld Convention would like to make that 824. Please help us.