7 Fascinating Facts for Manchester Day

To help celebrate Manchester Day (this year marked on Sunday, 19th June) we've put together a few of our favourite facts from across our range of hospitals and services.

Manchester Day is an annual event celebrating everything great about our city. It's a day for family, friends, residents and visitors to get together and celebrate everything great about Manchester.

We thought we'd join in the fun with our own list of facts we find fascinating about our hospitals.

1. We have incred-eye-ble experts working at Manchester Royal Eye Hospital. In fact, the hospital was the first in the world to treat dry age-related macular degeneration using a bionic eye in 2015.

2. There are more than 120 hotels in Manchester, but only one of them hosts our fantastic Humphrey's Heroes Abseil event. Yep, you can abseil 19 storeys and raise money for your favourite hospital. Manchester Foundation Trust Charity has teamed up with the Hyatt Regency Hotel to host the event. Let's throw in another fact - 19 storeys is about 170ft from top to bottom. That's the same as abseiling down 17-and-a-bit double decker buses. But this destination stop is a beautiful garden where you can enjoy a cocktail or mocktail as reward for your bravery. Sign up here and we'll see you there.

3. Our Paediatric Critical Care Unit at Royal Manchester Children's Hospital is the largest in the country and is one of the leading centres in the North West. The unit has 19 ICU beds and 14 high-dependency beds. When your child needs this type of care, they are really sick and in need of expert care. So we're very proud to have such a professional and specialist service available to our little ones living in Manchester and across the region.

4. Our Trust employs 28,000 staff which means if we all decided to watch a concert at the AO Arena, 7,000 staff would be left disappointed. Yep, the AO Arena has a capacity of 21,000. So next time you visit the arena, remember all those NHS workers we employ and imagine them singing along with you at the gig.

5. Did you know it will soon be the NHS' birthday? To help mark the occasion we're holding a Dress To Impress for the NHS initiative. What will you wear to mark the occasion? Wear something fun and raise funds for our Greater Manchester hospitals during the week of 4th-10th July. Will you go full-on fancy dress and face paint, or keep it simple with odd socks? It all counts.

Related note: Our very own Trafford General Hospital is the "birthplace of the NHS". It was the first NHS hospital, opened by Aneurin Bevan in 1948. Not quite a Manchester fact, but deserving of an honoury mention.

6. This year Wythenshawe Hospital is either 70 years old or 120 years old! Whichever date you count, that's a lot of candles to fit on one cake.
The first hospital on the site was Baguley Sanitorium, which opened in October 1920 (120 years ago). However Wythenshawe Hospital was officially established in February 1952 (70 years ago). Whichever date you take, it's a huge birthday for Wythenshawe this year.

Why not consider fundraising for Wythenshawe to mark the occasion? Wythensnhawe is a major acute hospital, a recognised centre of clinical excellence and home to the incredible ECMO team. The ECMO (extracorporal membrane oxygenation) unit uses a cutting edge technique to take over a patient's heart and lung functions to allow these organs to recover. Read more about this life-saving piece of equipment on our Trust website. Or why not find out more about donating to Wythenshawe Hospital Charity here.

7. Speaking of birthdays, did you know Saint Mary's Hospital delivers more than 16,000 babies each year? That's a lot of parents seeing their little ones for the first time in our hospital. Congratulations to everyone who became a parent this year!

Which ones did you know? Have you learned something new reading this piece? Let us know on our social media: Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.