The Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario

The CHEO Telethon has been around for 33 years. It's a community tradition. We've had volunteers who have volunteered every telethon, and we've had donors who have donated for every telethon.

One of the challenges for a children's hospital is that we can't rely on our patients to be donors, they're children. And their parents are at an age and
stage in life when they don't have a lot of disposable income to make big donations to a hospital. So we really rely on the telethon.

The funds are used to support the need of families within CHEO, so that's supporting everything from equipment purchases, to some of the social supports that they require. It's the staff training, it's programs like the child life program where people work with kids and make as normal an environment as possible for children. We provide the arts and crafts and games and all of those types of things. It's from the very serious things, the expensive pieces of equipment, right down to boxes of crayons. Without the technical support of Mitel, we couldn't do it. We actually were in a predicament a number of years ago looking at this event and Mitel provided a solution for us to be able to continue to hold an event that is so dear to us but also to our entire community.

Without the donor support, the time of care that's available at CHEO currently would not be available.

I think the most beautiful thing is that we have partners, like Mitel, that work with us so closely. And we've been working together for so long. And it helps that partnership smooths the process out, but it also helps reduce the cost because we're a non for profit and our partners are very generous to us.

It is no exaggeration to say, that if it were not for companies like Mitel, for the generosity of the companies and the commitment of their employees, that we would not have the breadth of research that we have. We would not be able to invest in the cutting-edge equipment that we need for our patients. And that we would not have those enhancements to the patient experience. None of that would be happening if it weren't for the generosity, the commitment, and the ongoing support, year after year after year of companies like Mitel.
 
We cannot do the telethon without Mitel. We can't do a telethon without phones. So that technology, actually the telethon, simply just wouldn't exist.

Mitel, thank you very, very much.