Ronald McDonald House Southwestern Ontario / Kate Otterbein, XFM News
Ronald McDonald House London is seeing some new changes in the near future. RMH is adding 5 more bedrooms, allowing 215 more families to stay per year.
RMH is a place for families to go when their child is in need of medical care at the Children’s Hospital. It’s a “home away from home” where families are steps away from the hospital if they need to get there quickly.
“65% of families live outside of a city with a children’s hospital. You can imagine the travel expenses of going back and forth and the expenses of having to find a place to stay,” says Brianna Evans, the marketing and communications specialist for the Ronald McDonald House.
RMH asks families to pay $12 a night, but no family gets turned away because they aren’t able to pay. For everyone who stays, it creates a familiar place to return to after a long day at the hospital.
“When you walk downstairs and you see mom at the coffee machine making a coffee and patient and sister at the kitchen table eating breakfast together, if they didn’t have this home away from home, you wouldn’t have those little family moments that make the really hard days a little bit easier to get through,” says Evans.
Charlene O’Reilly has stayed many nights at the Ronald McDonald House with her son, Dean. Dean O’Reilly has a rare epileptic disorder called KCNQ2.
“The London location was completely life-changing because we’re only about an hour and a half from the hospital, but we’re also in Huron County winters when you can’t get somebody somewhere very quickly. When his seizures were life-threatening, then we needed to get somewhere very quickly,” says O’Reilly.
She adds it is truly a home away from home for them.
“Immediately you have a safe place to go, where you didn’t have to pretend anything. They knew that you were going through a life crisis and that you didn’t want to be one step away from your child,” O’Reilly says.
The additional 5 rooms at RMH will give more families the shelter and care they need to get them through difficult times. The availability will increase by 1,825 more nights.
“I see a lot of the families that are there for a long time, or they’re frequent fliers like us where they come back for a lot of different treatments and things like that. So having more rooms at the house will be amazing,” O’Reilly says.
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