Music and Laughs for a Spring Evening

Harmony Mill

The third annual Spring Concert for Stewart Memorial Hospital will be held on Saturday, May 4, 2013, at 7:30 p.m. at Britannia Hall, 816 Canada Road in Tyne Valley.

Concertgoers can expect an evening of diverse and excellent entertainment. The Harmony Mill Band will blend their guitars and voices on a few numbers.  Local musical hero Roy MacCaull will also put his guitar and great voice to work, and as a special treat he is going to bring to life some of his own musical heroes.  Singing trio The Sisters will offer up a couple of their favourite songs.

Word has reached concert organizers that their friend Annie will be visiting from Way Up West to give her own unique and funny take on life.  And a couple of ladies from the beloved Britannia Hall players are promising to add some fun and humor to the evening as they poke fun at recent current events!  There will also be a fudge sale, 50/50 and a raffle draw for a beautiful hand-knit afghan.

Concert tickets are $7.50 and will be available at the door.  Please join us to have some old-fashioned fun in the historic and beautiful Britannia Hall and support our wonderful Stewart Memorial Hospital.

The Stewart Memorial Hospital Auxiliary has been fundraising for 63 consecutive years.  Members continue to raise thousands of dollars each year to purchase items for the care and comfort of hospital patients and residents.

To Love and To Cherish

Erma and Richard Found lived in Bideford for 25 years from 1937 to 1962 while Mr. Found worked at the Ellerslie Biological Station.  They were both very active community volunteers.  Mr. Found was the first chairman of the Stewart Memorial Hospital board and drew up the plans for the hospital, while Mrs. Found was an active Auxiliary member.

Mrs. Found wrote her memoir entitled To Love and To Cherish in 1975.  In it she related many of the challenges of living in rural Prince Edward Island, especially the precarious nature of healthcare available at that time.

The following excerpt from her book rings true today.  Sadly, we no longer have a local board, but we certainly have the dedicated staff and volunteers!

“For a district without the services of a local doctor, there were mounting difficulties in times of emergency to bring medical aid from Summerside, some twenty-five miles away.  We couldn’t expect a doctor to assume the responsibilities of an isolated community without a well-equipped small hospital, however small.  Murmurings of concern came from every district, so it was finally decided to build our own hospital.

What does a community need to begin a hospital?  A hospital cannot be built without hard work or without dedicated men and women.

A community needs leadership to draw together these men and women – someone who has enough faith and determination to see the project completed in spite of many discouragements that attend such an undertaking.

A community needs women.  They’re the ones who have uncanny capacity for raising money for the hospital requirements.

In order to build a hospital, a community needs a Hospital Board of fine, farsighted people who have confidence and faith in their community.

The final requirement is a staff of dedicated nurses and a doctor with integrity, ideals and ambition, who support the hospital for what they can put into it and not for what they can get out of it.

When we decided to build a hospital in our district, we recognized that all these qualifications had to be in our community.  We would name our hospital “The Stewart Memorial Health Center” in memory of a former doctor who had given his life for this community years ago."

Show Your Pride!

The Friends of Stewart Memorial Hospital have been working very hard preparing for the April 15 rally against the recently announced changes at SMH.  The meeting is scheduled for 7 p.m. at Ellerslie Elementary.  The Auxiliary are helping with this meeting and now we need your help, too.  It would really just take a couple of minutes of your time.

We are looking for photos of people holding a sign that says Proud of MY Stewart Memorial Hospital.  The one we created can be downloaded here for printing.

If you have a group, you can download and print a sign that says Proud of OUR Stewart Memorial Hospital here.

Be as creative as you like, just make sure we can see you and your sign. (If you want to make your own PROUD sign, please do, but keep it simple and suitable for all ages!)

When you've taken your photo, email it to smhauxiliary@gmail.com.  We need them by April 14, so you have a chance to get photos of lots of people!

Then come out to the April 15 rally and see us all united and proud of our wonderful hospital.