From Lucia De Ranieri, President of FIRENZE IN ROSA Onlus
Report from Lucia on the work of FIRENZE IN ROSA Onlus, the organizers of the 2018 IBCPC festival in Florence and how they are gifting the surplus funds and also fundraising even more funds to support important breast cancer initiatives.
Like many other diseases, breast cancer knows no limits, it does not respect distances and pandemics, and the promotion of prevention must not be stopped.
With greater strength in this historical period of difficulty due to the emergency COVID-19, which has recorded a significant drop in screening, FIRENZE IN ROSA Onlus wanted to remind people how important it is to participate in prevention. On the occasion of Pink October, the month dedicated to the breast cancer prevention and awareness, FIRENZE IN ROSA Onlus offered free breast ultrasound checks to everyone, giving the opportunity to the more than 250 people who joined our 2020 initiative to undertake prevention concretely. The invitation was also extended to men with a family history of the disease.
Today, more than ever, early detection is essential for the protection of health, as it allows the detection of cancer at an early stage of formation. It is therefore evident that the use of increasingly efficient diagnostic machinery becomes essential. In this field, our association is committed to fundraising campaigns to provide the Florentine territory with more and more cutting-edge tools.
The pandemic and its consequences have put a strain on communities and economies around the world and certainly made it very difficult for all charity and volunteer organizations to raise funds for their projects.
For the year 2020 FIRENZE IN ROSA had set itself an ambitious project: to donate to the University Hospital of Careggi an ultrasound of leading-edge technology. When the health emergency broke out due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we mobilized quickly by making our immediate contribution to the fight against the Coronavirus, and we decided to allocate part of the funds for the purchase of the ultrasound collected up to that time, to purchase essential tools for the protection of health professionals and for the care of patients in hospitals. We therefore donated a Carat II Pro ventilator to the Santa Maria Nuova Hospital in Florence, 10,000 surgical masks for the operators and volunteers of the Federazione Misericordie della Toscana and 6000 moisturizers for medical and health staff who work in the departments Covid-19 of the 3 hospitals in Florence.
With determination we continued our 2020 awareness campaign and thanks to the generous contribution of the donors who support us, we have been able to raise the necessary funds for the purchase of the specialized ultrasound machine, thus achieving the important goal of giving a cutting-edge machine with high efficiency and performance to the Careggi Hospital in memory of a special person, Caterina Tacconi Stefanelli, a great friend who died prematurely 5 years ago.
