British Heart Foundation supporters day

During the summner staff from across the Directorate for the Student Experience visited the Division of Cardiovascular Sciences, to understand how monies raised from the Give It Don’t Bin It campaign are invested by the British Heart Foundation (BHF).

Give It Don’t Bin It (GIDBI) is an end of year reuse/recycling scheme which encourages students to donate their unwanted items (clothes, shoes, books, crockery, electrical items and furniture) to The British Heart Foundation. The campaign has been running since 2012 and has raised over £1.5 million to support vital life-saving heart research.

Last year the BHF raised almost £160 million with £100m going towards research from which the North-West benefits from £25m and with £19m going directly to the University of Manchester.

Ten million people a year need BHF support in the UK due to heart disease and diabetes with a further 30,000 people having a cardiac arrest outside of hospital every year. The BHF are encouraging everyone to learn CPR training and have already managed to achieve this across 79% of all high schools. Every minute that someone is left alone, whilst having a cardiac arrest, can increase the risk of dying by 10% and with illnesses like this, it is more important than ever to provide awareness training and research into life threatening diseases.

To help boost our donations, we are asking staff and students to donate any unwanted items to use the red BHF donation banks across campus to support both the GIDBI campaign and the vital work of the BHF.

Professor Bernard Keavney, Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine said: “At least one in four families in the UK will have a member die due to heart and circulatory disease, and Greater Manchester has the worst rates for these diseases in the whole of the country. The British Heart Foundation funds and supports my research team, which is focused on improving the outcomes for babies and children born with congenital malformations of the heart. Donating unwanted items at the end of the academic year is a fantastic way to support research that will benefit heart patients of all ages”.