Our vital service is available at no cost to families. Rainbow Trust is a charity, relying almost entirely on voluntary donations and the generosity of the public to deliver support.

Rainbow Trust Children’s Charity supports families who have a child aged 0-18 years with a life-threatening or terminal illness.

We are a warm, caring and kind place because:

• We offer small group work and activities
• Parents/carers can discuss individual needs prior to visiting

We’re a charitable hospice rooted in the North East. We provide outstanding, specialist and expert care to adults and children with life-limiting conditions. We strive to provide quality time for everyone.

Respite and taking a break

Caring for someone can be physically and emotionally exhausting, and carers struggle to find the time to look after themselves. You may feel unable to leave the person you care for but taking a break can help you provide better care and avoid burning out. Find out who can help you organise a break, and how to make sure your friend or family member gets the right care while you’re away from them.

The health visitor’s role starts during pregnancy and continues to offer support through the first few weeks after the birth, and all the way through until early childhood.

All health visitors are nurses or midwives with specialist training in family and community health. They work with parents and families to improve health and wellbeing.

The health visitors are part of a team that includes staff nurses and community nursery nurses.

We are one of only two centres in the UK dedicated to treating children with immune system deficiencies.

Our pioneering new treatments enable children to lead normal, healthy lives free of all medication.

Part of the children’s immunology service, we are recognised as one of the leading clinical research units in Europe for children’s immunology and infectious diseases.

This includes Severe Combined Immune Deficiency Syndrome (SCIDS) and bone marrow transplants. 

The children and young people’s haematology and oncology service, cares for children and young people under the age of 21 who have cancer, leukaemia and other related diseases. 

Our department is one of the largest, most advanced in the UK, providing a comprehensive range of leading edge oncology services, including chemotherapy, radiotherapy and surgery.

We are the Regional Treatment Centre for all of the Northern region, treating patients from Teesside to Newcastle, and Northumberland to Cumbria.

Our children’s community nursing service provides specialist care for children and young people up to the age of 19 years.

We aim to help you and your child to lead a fulfilling everyday life. We work to keep hospital admissions to a minimum by providing modern nursing care and support for your child and family in your own home.

This can include:

The children’s ear, nose and throat (ENT) service is for young patients, from newborn to 16 years old.

Conditions we treat

We provide services to treat common childhood ENT complaints such as:

• persistently runny or blocked noses
• breathing problems
• throat infections
• nasal speech
• snoring.

This might include procedures such as:

We are a registered charity set up in 1990 in Newcastle upon Tyne, at a time when the North East had the worst levels of child health in the country (Government report Health of the Nation 1990).

Our children’s gastroenterology and nutrition unit cares for children with disorders of the gut, liver and pancreas, as well as children with nutritional problems.

Based at the Great North Children’s Hospital, our team includes:

• expert consultants
• specialist dieticians
• paediatric pharmacists
• highly-trained paediatric nurses.

We provide a wide range of diagnostic and treatment services for children from across northern England.

A cleft lip is a gap in the upper lip and a cleft palate is a gap in the roof of the mouth.

We also see people who may be experiencing speech problems related to how well their palate is working for speech even when there is no obvious cleft palate.

Our service is operated by an experienced team of specialists from a range of clinical disciplines, including:

Our dermatology department is child friendly and we have a highly skilled team of Nurse Specialists and a Nursery Nurse to help distract our young patients.

We know that coming into hospital can often be upsetting for children and their parents. To help make your child’s experience as stress free as possible, we have a special clinic just for children in our Dermatology Outpatient Department.

Most of our patients are referred to us by GPs, but we also see patients from other hospitals across the region.

Our dermatology experts in Newcastle help to diagnose and treat hundreds of patients every year and care for both adults and children.

They run a number of general and specialist dermatology clinics and deal with a wide range of conditions and diseases affecting the skin, mucous membranes, hair and nails.

Some of our specialists also perform dermatological surgical procedures such as Mohs micrographic surgery (a type of surgery for removing certain types of skin cancer), laser surgery and some cosmetic surgery.

Antenatal refers to the period of time from when you get pregnant up to the point you go into labour. Regular antenatal appointments help us to ensure that you and your baby are healthy. It will also help us to recognise when input from our specialist antenatal services might be necessary.

Our expertise is recognised across the region for our skills, facilities and specialist services. We provide a range of emergency and non-emergency services for both children and adults, these include:

Newcastle’s Endocrine surgery department provides first-class care for patients who need surgical treatment for benign and malignant conditions affecting the thyroid, parathyroid and adrenal glands.

The team looks after both adults and children, and works closely alongside endocrinologists, ENT surgeons, oncologists (cancer specialists), radiologists and pathologists, and our clinical nurse specialists. This multidisciplinary approach ensures each patient we see is provided with a treatment pathway tailored to their particular condition.

We treat patients who need elective surgery in addition to emergency cases.

The centre, based at the Claremont Wing at the RVI, has state-of-the-art diagnostic and treatment facilities for medical and surgical conditions affecting the eye, including:

The Fracture Clinic is based in the New Victoria Wing at the Royal Victoria Infirmary and provides an outpatient service for both children and adults, usually following a bone fracture.

You can be referred to this clinic by your GP, or you may be sent here following a visit to either the Emergency Department, Walk in Centre or Minor Injury Unit. 

Nurse Practitioners run special clinics to review patients with fractures, in particular those who have fractured a hip.

The Great North Children's Hospital provides the full range of children's health services, all tailored to each and every child - we call this patient-centred care.

The Public Health School Nursing Service works together with children, young people and their parents/carers to provide a comprehensive efficient and accessible service.  We offer health assessment at transition points throughout a child’s life.

The health visitor’s role starts during pregnancy and continues to offer support through the first few weeks after the birth and all the way through until early childhood.

All health visitors are nurses or midwives with specialist training in family and community health. They work with parents and their families to improve health and wellbeing.