On Friday 20th May Rebecca Wilson, Jon Hunt, Jason Garrick, Chris Binnie, Laura Robinson, Phil Robinson and Lewis Hyde will be walking the Yorkshire Three Peaks in aid of Our Angels charity.

This is a 24 mile hike across the three highest peaks in Yorkshire and will be completed within a 12 hour window, by no means a walk in the park!

We are walking to raise funds for Our Angels, a charity and support group based in Harrogate that helps families dealing with the tragedy of stillbirth, miscarriage, or neonatal death.

The funds raised will make a difference to this local charity which was set up by a group of bereaved parents in January 2009 who recognised there was a lack of support available for parents facing the heartbreak of losing a child.

The charity has provided memory boxes & keepsakes for bereaved parents and a cold cot to enable parents to spend as many precious hours as possible with their baby.

The charity has also helped in training midwives to enable them to feel confident in dealing with issues such as stillbirth and neonatal death. Handling the death of a newborn or stillborn baby is an incredibly specialised type of bereavement support, and one that is very challenging for medical professionals who spend the majority of their time dealing with the joy of healthy newborn children. 

Sadly, baby loss is not something that we can stop, but together we can make sure that families going through it are supported, comforted, and helped through this devastating time. Funds raised will allow them to continue to support families in Yorkshire with further midwife training as well as potentially extending this to other NHS professionals having contact with families during these darkest of times.

They will also continue to provide support to bereaved families through the support group as well as the memory boxes that give parents the means to build something to remember their baby by.

Stillbirth & neonatal death is one of the last “taboo” topics of modern times, something that affects far more people than appreciated, but one which people still shy away from discussing publicly. The UK stillbirth rate has dropped little in over two decades, and remains one of the highest in the developed world. Depending on the statistics you look at, somewhere between 11 and 17 babies are stillborn in the UK every day. One in 200 babies dies before birth (miscarriage or stillbirth). Stillbirth is ten times more common than cot death, but receives far less publicity and research.

There are few more heart wrenching causes than stillbirth and neonatal death, but fewer still that receive so little attention, funding, and support. Every pound raised is vital to the cause of not just trying to make this hardest time that tiny bit more bearable, but also working towards reducing the number of families affected by this tragic situation.

Please dig as deep as you can for this very worthy cause, and thanks for reading!