News

The Nurse's Tale

As 2010 begins to wind down, we take a look at how our nursing staff cope with life in the occupied Palestinian territory (OPT), and make our Christmas Cards available once again (yes, already!) It’s all change at the London office as another St John legend retires and we introduce the youngest member of our Fundraising and Marketing Team. Also in this edition, Chairman John Talbot discusses Gaza.

Celebrating St John’s Nurses

The St John Eye Hospital has been providing nursing care to the Palestinian people for 128 years. As a charity, teaching and training nurses is one of our primary objectives and the Hospital’s Sir Stephen Miller School of Nursing has been educating local nurses for more than 40 years. Our Specialist Ophthalmic Nursing Course makes unique postgraduate training available in the region, and is accredited by the Thames Valley University.

By training local people, we invest in the region and help to rebuild the fractured local infrastructure. In fact, “Mutashfa Eyoon”, as the Jerusalem Hospital is known locally, is respected as one of the most reliable employers in the region. We are extremely proud to say that all but one of the 93 nurses we currently employ have been trained by the Hospital Group. We invest in local people and they, in return, work exceptionally hard to help those who need it most.

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Thoughts from our Chief Executive

The commitment of the St John Staff

Within the Hospital Group we employ 93 nurses of various grades, most of whom we have had the privilege of training. Between them, as at the end of August 2010, they have provided us with a total of 1,080 years of service! Quite a statistic – and one that many hospitals around the globe would be extremely envious of.

Some 25 of our nurses are sponsored through the generosity of different St John Priories and their Counties. County Representatives work incredibly hard, along with the respective Hospitallers, to raise funds for such purposes. We also receive some funds from Trusts and the EU and, in total, we will benefit from £400,000 in sponsorship this year.

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Popular Hospital Figure retires

Our Deputy Chairman celebrates the dedicated service of Sylvia Holmes

Sylvia Holmes joined the Hospital Foundation in 1986 at the request of Sir Stephen Miller, Hospitaller 1980-90. She had run his private practice for over 15 years, having previously worked for him in the Glaucoma Unit of Moorfields Eye Hospital.

Sir Stephen, Surgeon Oculist to Her Majesty The Queen 1965-74, was also appointed to many of the Royal Households in the Middle East. A very successful fund raising campaign was organised that was to lay the foundations for the present Endowment Fund. Major contributors included many past patients and was particularly enhanced by the Ladies Guild under the Chairmanship of the Countess Cathcart. Sylvia soon forged a close friendship with Lady Cathcart and counts her help with the Guild as one of the high points of her St. John career.

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Gaza

Our Deputy Chairman celebrates the dedicated service of Sylvia Holmes

It is the mission of St. John Eye Hospital to provide eye care to all those who need it, regardless of their ability to pay. If ever there was a population that met this criterion, it is the people of the Gaza Strip. Opened in the 1990s, our Hospital in Gaza City has been the focus of a small but important effort to bring care to isolated and needy people. From the outset, the Hospital, providing both outpatient and daycase surgical care, has been beset with problems. The doctors and nurses work under very difficult circumstances, always the victims of a changing, and generally deteriorating, political environment. I visited Gaza for the first time in July 2008. It was shocking to see the difficulties getting in and out of the enclave. For me, as an visitor, it was hard enough getting a permit to enter through the Erez checkpoint, let alone go through the actual process of admission. The return journey was difficult too, with long delays and the ever present anxiety that the checkpoint would be closed before the bureaucracy had been completed. My predecessor, Tony Chignell, and CEO, Rod Bull, had to suffer a rocket attack on the Erez checkpoint on leaving the enclave in early 2008.

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Nursing Times

Three of our dedicated staff tell us their own tales

Nader Ibrahim Hajjaj

Nader Ibrahim Hajjaj is a Licensed Practical Nurse at our Hospital in Hebron. Nader is one of the few nurses we employ who did not come up through our own training facilities. Before coming to work with us in 1992, he was at the Al Hada Hospital in Saudi Arabia and then the Bethlehem Government Hospital. Since then, Nader has worked in many of the different Hospital departments. He was in the out-patients clinic in Jerusalem for four years and the operating theatre there for another. He then worked on the in-patients ward for six years and Outreach for three years, before starting at Hebron in 2005.

Nasrallah Khalilieh, Charge Nurse at Jerusalem and Co-ordinator of our Outreach Clinics, first came to St. John as a child with his grandfather, who was undergoing eye surgery. He remembers the crowds and the noise in the Hospital even then. Many years later, his childhood memory accompanies him through the noisy, crowded corridors and waiting rooms of the Hospital today. Nasrallah enrolled on the Ophthalmic Nursing Course in November 1999 after achieving a Diploma in Community Health. He completed the course successfully, was awarded the School of Nursing Hallendorff Cup and was immediately employed at the Hospital as a junior charge nurse.

Ghazi El Baba is an Ophthalmic Nurse at the St. John Eye Clinic in Gaza. Ghazi was trained as a nurse at our Jerusalem Hospital and has been working for us since qualifying in 1980. One of the many stories that Ghazi is particularly fond of remembering concerns an incident that occurred while he was working on the Jerusalem Children’s Ward in 1990. A woman had come in with her son, who duly underwent surgery. Ghazi was then teaching her how to administer the necessary eye-drops for her child but noticed that she didn’t seem to see very well herself. When Ghazi asked if this was, indeed, the case, the woman denied it point blank.

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Eye Hospital Investiture 2010

October Event in Jerusalem

The Order of St. John is an Order of chivalry under the patronage of Her Majesty The Queen. Honours awarded by the Order are, accordingly, of high status, sanctioned in every case by Her Majesty. Everyone that works for the Hospital and our patients is scrutinised carefully every year for admission to the Order, or promotion within it.

It is not easy to become a Member of the Order. Every nomination has to be supported by evidence that he or she has given outstanding service, beyond what they are expected to provide in their employment. There has not been an Investiture in Jerusalem for two years and the number this year – a total of 28 honours were bestowed at an Investiture Ceremony held in St George’s Anglican Cathedral in October – is testament to extraordinary dedication and achievement. Every one honoured more than deserved our great thanks and appreciation.

Chairman, John Talbot

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Support

Funding Today

The St. John Family

A heartfelt thank you – as always – goes out to all those of the St John Family across the world who are raising vital funding for our work. By mid-September this year, the Priory of England had already donated £242,983, the Priory of the United States had given £112,251, the Priory of Scotland £106,484, the Priory of New Zealand £69,835, the Priory of Canada £69,766 and the Priory of Wales £10,000. We would also like to say a special thank you to the Commandery of Ards in Northern Ireland, whose generous donation of £50,000 earlier this year – as well as £50,000 last year – has facilitated the refurbishment of the Jerusalem Hospital reception area.

Jerusalem
Despite recent disasters like the Pakistani floods and Haitian earthquakes dominating donor imagination, many local and international supporters remain engaged with our mission to preserve the sight of marginalized communities across the OPT. Many Government Aid Agencies, International and local NGOs, United Nations Agencies, Diplomatic Missions, Arab Funds, Faith-based Foundations, Private Donors and local companies, continue to form strategic partnerships with St. John to help enable the sick and poor. The United States Agency for International Development has donated $90,000 for a pioneering project based around, “Early detection of visual impairments in children and those who are at risk of disability”. Additionally, this project will reach out to the most underprivileged communities in Gaza by providing our Clinic there with some much needed medical equipment. PACES – the Palestine Association for Children's Encouragement of Sports – is an important new partner, who are helping us to implement a pilot screening program for the children taking part in their sporting events.

London
In London, too, our work continues to capture the imagination of supporters and funders. The total raised so far this year in the UK is £949,723, with a further £200,000 pledged. We are particularly pleased to announce that our appeal to raise funds for our new Medical Retinal Unit to mark 50 years of the Jerusalem Hospital building has been very successful. We have raised over and above the sum originally asked for and now have some of the money that we will need to purchase the vital equipment that such a facility will require. We especially thank the Norwegian Representative’s Office in Jerusalem for their vital support of this project. Thank you also to Deputy Chairman, Antoine Mattar’s business concern, Consolidated Contractors Company, which has given a total of £31,000 to the Hospital Group this year. Thanks to Mr Mattar’s support we were also able to host two fund – and awareness – raising cultural events in November in the beautiful atrium of the CCC Building in Belgravia. The main focus of these evenings was the launch of our ‘Sponsor a Nurse Campaign’ and they proved to be a great success with old and new supporters alike.
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New Staff Member, New Partners, New Campaigns...

London Recruit Outlines New Strategies

Our Fundraising and Marketing Office in London has a new staff member. Faryal Awan, Fundraising and PR Officer, joined SJEH in June 2010. She has an MSc in Middle East Politics from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, and has experience volunteering and living in Palestine. She is passionate about healthcare and human rights in the occupied Palestinian territory (OPT). Faryal has taken on the task of broadening and diversifying our audience and donor base, with special focus on creating links with the Muslim and Jewish populations of the UK.

Reaching out to the next generation: Volunteering and Presentations.

With an ageing supporter base, it Is vitally important that our charity reach out to new audiences. Young people offer a pool of untapped potential and we are currently looking at new ways to benefit from their volunteerism, energy and creativity. We are most grateful to our friends in the London Universities’ Palestinian Societies. With their kind help and support, we were able to obtain a presence at Fresher’s Fairs across London: at SOAS, at the London School of Economics, at Kings College London and at Queen Mary University. We are also thankful to our new friends at the Muslim College, with whom we will be working closely in the coming years.

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St John Cadet Wins Trip to the West Bank

Durham’s Zoe Howe to visit Hospital

As part of their Freemasonry in the Community programme, The Provincial Priory of Durham, in conjunction with Durham Freemasonry (non Masonic Grants) has sponsored a triennial bursary to send St John Ambulance Cadets to the Eye Hospital in Jerusalem. The inaugural bursary was open to those aged 18 to 25, and enrolled as members of the Cadet Section of the St John Ambulance in Durham, with the winner attending the Hospital and West Bank Satellite Clinics to work as a volunteer for a week in May 2011. To enter, each Cadet was required to explain how the visit would benefit them and others in a minimum of 1,500 words along with a brief summary of their work as a Cadet. The finalists consisted of Matthew Craig Todd from the Willington Division and Zoe Howe of the Darlington Division. Both entries were of the highest standard with the panel taking a considerable time to reach their choice.

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Christmas Cards on Sale

It’s Christmas time again and The St John of Jerusalem Eye Hospital Group is pleased to be making our range of Christmas cards available again this year. There are 3 designs available. The order form is available on our website or they can be ordered over the phone. Please note – due to the cost of postage we do not usually send orders abroad.

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Facebook

The St John Eye Hospital Group is now on Facebook. Please join our group by logging onto Facebook and searching for, St John of Jerusalem Eye Hospital.

Link to facebook here

Are you fundraising on behalf of the Eye Hospital?

Or merely interested in a quick overview of the tremendous scope of our work? We've recently added a powerpoint presentation to our list of publications.

Our Community Fundraising pack is now available for download on our website

Click here to see Fundraising tools

Donate online Now!

You can now support the Eye Hospital by making a donation via our website. We are able to accept donations via Mastercard, Visa, Switch & Maestro as well as regular donations made via Direct Debit.

Simply log on to: http://www.stjohneyehospital.org/donate-now, selecting 'Donate Now'.