The ER Recruitment team have proudly been working alongside the NHS and the Leicester Blood Donor Centre since 2020 to encourage new and existing donors to give blood.
The motivation stems from an inspiring young woman named Hayley who touched the hearts of not only our MD Eileen as a family friend but the entire team at Eileen Richards Recruitment, highlighting the need that as a community we can do more to continue to provide life to people like Hayley.
Hayley’s Story:
On Tuesday 13th March 2018 at 5:20am, Hayley’s life changed forever. After undergoing tests as a response to flu like symptoms, Hayley received the horrific news that any of us dread “you have leukaemia”. At age just 35 despite the shock and devastation Hayley faced her illness like a true warrior – which is where her nickname and later much-loved Facebook group evolved from.
Despite treatment and a bone marrow donation from her brother, Hayley unfortunately lost her battle. But Hayley isn’t alone – 15,000 lives are lost each year to various types of blood cancer, which is why we made a promise to Hayley to continue her action in raising awareness of the importance of blood donation to ensure less people are losing their fights.
Our Pledge:
Alongside Hayley and her family, team ER established a plan to fulfil her legacy. By the end of her fight, Hayley had received 67 blood and platelet transfusions which was a combination of 536 people’s blood donations. Without these donations, Hayley’s life would have been cut even shorter. With this in mind we decided it was vital to increase the amount of donors we have regularly donating blood in the Leicester region and do it in Hayley’s memory.
The Plan:
As well networked professionals within a supportive business community, we felt we could embrace this forum to encourage businesses and their employee’s to get involved in our blood donation drive by asking people to
#BleedForHayley. This consisted of both physical blood donations and encouraging businesses to provide employees with time off to donate blood in working hours, similar to other medical appointments.
The Mission:
To keep up with demand, the NHS needs 6,000 donations per day to meet the needs of patients across England, within a year of the campaign launch we will have accumulated a minimum of 500 of these donations.
We couldn’t save Hayley, but through this drive in her honour we can help to save others. Each of us, our families, our friends, our colleagues and the random passers-by in the street all need blood to survive, which is why we are doing what we can to ensure everybody has an equal chance of receiving it.
Since starting in 2020, we have encouraged 120+ people to give blood as part of our #BleedForHayley campaign with many of these people also going on to repeat donations regularly.
In true warrior style, we’re still going and we’d love to get even more people involved!
One donation can save up to 3 lives.
