The NHS needs our support. Bruce Millar talks to the local philanthropist helping Kingston Hospital to advance...
We all tend to take our local hospital for granted: it’s part of the furniture, a permanent fixture in a familiar landscape, funded by the NHS to look after us when required.
For many years, that’s pretty much how Dame Marit Mohn felt about Kingston Hospital, 20 minutes’ walk from her home on Kingston Hill – despite the fact that she is one of Britain’s leading philanthropists, heading a private charitable foundation whose interests and donations stretch from education to the arts.
“I knew the hospital from the inside: my son was born there,” she says, thinking back more than 40 years to an experience that was “a bit mixed – although the staff were really good”.
But it was only during Covid, when the nation joined ranks in thanking the NHS at a time of collective disaster, that the needs of the hospital came to her attention.
“Banging saucepans was all very well, but there was more that we could do,” she says. “I contacted the hospital charity, and we provided pastoral care in the form of a psychologist for people who were really struggling. Not only were NHS staff all but overwhelmed by the epidemic, but one or two of their Kingston colleagues died in it.”
Since then, Dame Marit has become one of the Kingston and Richmond NHS Foundation Trust’s most active supporters, contributing to a succession of projects – from the acquisition of the Trust’s first surgical robot and the opening of the Andrew Winrow Oncology Unit for children, to funding the new Mohn Senior Research Fellowship programme, under which eight senior clinicians have ring-fenced time in their working week to lead valuable research.
Dame Marit Mohn
“Having a connection with the medical staff and working with these incredibly passionate people is so rewarding,” she says, adding that we should all do what we can to support our local hospitals.
“The days are long gone when we can expect the state to provide everything our hospitals need. We should pay our taxes without too much grumbling, but beyond that we must also be prepared to give to charity if we can. Many people can’t afford to – they may want to volunteer in other ways – but I am lucky enough to be able to do it.”
Rob Aldous, Director of the Kingston Hospital Charity – which relies entirely on community support and donations – agrees.
“The NHS keeps the show on the road,” he says, “but we are here to make sure Kingston Hospital is the best it can be.”
In the current era of constrained national budgets, philanthropy can make a real, practical difference to a hospital’s performance – and Kingston Hospital Charity has stepped up to the task dramatically in recent years.
A decade ago, its sights were set lower, its methods more traditional, and it raised around £350,000 annually to help its partner NHS trust. Today, thanks to the generosity of its supporters, it typically generates around £2m to £2.5m a year, which has made possible a range of projects. Among them are development of the Maxwell Thorne Haematology Day Unit, the Nadhmi Auchi Retina Centre and a digital clinical design and manufacturing lab.
The hospital needs this support to fund equipment, research and innovation together with development of patient-centred spaces. These are not luxury add-ons: they are vital to the hospital’s continuing service to the patients who depend on it, in an ageing society with ever more need for medical care.
A patient’s wellbeing should leave hospital as soon as they are medically optimised for discharge. The latest advances in minimally invasive treatment, such as laser surgery and surgical robots, can expedite things dramatically. In some cases, patients can go home within hours of procedures that used to keep them in hospital for days.
“Robotic-assisted surgery is the future,” explains Rob Aldous. “For patients it means faster recovery times and fewer complications, but it also leaves the NHS trust better placed to attract talented surgeons and theatre staff. If we don’t have the equipment, they will go somewhere that does.”
After a successful career in her own right, Dame Marit came into a large personal fortune when the marine engineering company founded by her father, Frank Mohn, in Norway was sold back in 2014. Two years later, she and her son, Stian Westlake, set up the Mohn Westlake Foundation with two stated aims: to enhance the lives of children and young people, and to advance data transparency. So far it has donated more than £100m to various projects, for which its co-founder received a damehood in the 2024 New Year Honours list.
Beyond the Foundation, Dame Marit is a longstanding patron of the arts – in particular the Royal Opera House, the National Theatre and the Rose Theatre in Kingston – and education. She is closely involved with two institutions at which she studied: Kingston University and Imperial College.
Essentially modest in the Nordic way, with no airs or graces, Dame Marit allows her name to be used by the organisations she works with in the hope that other high-net-worth individuals will follow her philanthropic example.
Her support for Kingston Hospital is quite separate from the work of her Foundation and, being quite literally closer to home, is more personal in motivation. This is often so with donors to hospitals, who may wish to thank the service through which they or their family were treated.
Dame Marit recalls her father being fitted with a stent in the early years of modern heart surgery, after he had suffered an aneurysm.
“It was the wrong size and had to be refitted. My father was pretty angry and wanted to know why this had happened. It was because the hospital didn’t have a machine to measure the size – so he donated one.”
She also remembers her mother suffering with cancer.
“I am interested in anything that can speed up cancer diagnosis, like endoscopy for bile duct cancer, or the promising new developments on detecting lung cancer with a urine test.”
Altruism is, of course, the prime driver of philanthropy, and donors tend to give in line with their own fields of interest and expertise. But there are sound, if slightly more selfish, reasons to donate to your local hospital. Should you find yourself spending unplanned time there, you will want treatment that uses the latest technology and equipment, delivered in patient-centred spaces that facilitate the best possible care. Put simply, the better your hospital is funded, equipped and staffed, the better should be the experience and the outcome.
“We have achieved so much in recent years, thanks to our amazing community of supporters, but there is scope to do so much more,” says Rob Aldous. “We need more people who appreciate the Trust’s services to get involved. There are so many ways to make a tangible difference.”
For information on how to support Kingston Hospital Charity, or to sign up for its newsletter, visit khc.org.uk, call (020) 8973 5040 or email: krft.charity@nhs.net.
