Children's hospital is given £10m by City firm

Great Ormond Street Hospital was today given a £10million donation, the biggest corporate gift in its history.

Finance giant Morgan Stanley has pledged the money to help rebuild overcrowded wards where some of the sickest children in the country are treated.

The hospital is already being redeveloped but many patients and staff still have to use buildings dating back to 1937.

Families visiting sick children have barely any room and parents are unable to sleep alongside their sons and daughters because of the lack of space. There is also no proper space for families who need to grieve after losing a child.

Doctors working in the cardiac critical care unit have to climb over equipment.

Great Ormond Street is planning a £321million overhaul that will give every parent the option to stay with their child throughout the night.

Professor Martin Elliot, head of cardiothoracic surgery, said: "We just want to make sure that every child is okay. Unless you get the environment right you won't be able to do that."

The rebuild, part of which will incorporate the Morgan Stanley Clinical Building, will take up two thirds of the site. Due to be completed by 2011, it will include a new heart and lung centre, neurosciences and nephrology.

It will bring the entire hospital into line with its Octav Botner wing, where every bay has a bathroom, parents can stay over and children can use a sensory playroom filled with therapeutic lights.

Morgan Stanley's donation, which is more than double the previous corporate record, comes after concerted efforts by staff to raise the hospital's profile at senior level. Jim Ball, 39, a managing director in the firm's equity division, has helped raise more than £300,000 for Great Ormond Street since his five-yearold son James developed a kidney condition while in the womb, which was treated at the hospital.

He said: "When you realise how wonderful the staff are it is just incredible."

Jonathan Chenevix-Trench, a Morgan Stanley managing director, said the donation was a way of "giving back" to London, which had helped make the firm successful. Its new building would provide "world-class facilities to match its world-class care", he added.