Southend Hospital Charitable Foundation is an independent registered charity which raises money for major fundraising projects at Southend University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust.

The Charitable Foundation was founded in 1998 to mark the 50th Anniversary of the NHS and continue the tradition upon which the hospital had been built. The trustees at the time, as today, were a group of local people who cared greatly about Southend and wanted to help enhance the services that the hospital could provide.

The Bosom Pals Appeal on the road is the Charitable Foundation’s current appeal and they are delighted to be working in partnership with the Bosom Pals patient support group.

Southend University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust helps more than 350, 000 patients each year. It is a busy district general hospital, providing a wide range of acute services and specialising in cancer care.

Breast cancer has a major impact on the lives of individuals it affects. Unfortunately it is now the most common cancer in women in the UK, with one in nine women diagnosed and occasionally some men too. Early detection and treatment of this disease can enable patients to resume a normal life.

Thank you for supporting the Bosom Pals Appeal

We are extremely grateful to everyone in the community who helped us achieve the first phase of our appeal and raise £750,000. The funds were used to buy two digital mammography machines and associated equipment for the Breast Unit at Southend Hospial. 

The charity has now decided that women screened in mobile units throughout South Essex deserve to have access to the same technology, and we are taking Bosom Pals on the road to make this possible.

Bosom Pals Appeal On The Road

The Breast Unit is the base for NHS South Essex Breast Screening - providing the mobile screening services across the community.  At present 28,000, women between the ages of 50 – 70 are invited for screening a year.

To help improve survival rates, we would like to increase the number of women screened by extending the eligibility age to between 47 and 73 years. This cannot be done, however, with-out new digital mammography technology.

To help make this ambitious project a reality, we need your support to raise £500,000 to fund two new mobile screening trailers complete with full-field digital mammography machines. 

This improved technology will not only allow us to implement age extension – which would see the number of women invited to screening rise to over 38,000 each year - but it will also help to provide shorter examination times, better technique and image quality — helping to save more lives.