New Ronald McDonald House location for sick kids opens in Crawley as planning beings for massive expansion

A 50-room satellite site for Ronald McDonald House will welcome its first families on Monday as work begins on a business case to triple the capacity of its Nedlands headquarters. The long-running charity provides accommodation and wraparound support to regional families forced to travel to Perth while their children receive medical treatment. Surging demand has overwhelmed Ronald McDonald House’s two existing facilities, which comprise 47 rooms at its primary location at the QEII Medical Centre and 14 rooms inside Perth Children’s Hospital. A $9.6 million funding injection from the Cook Government has allowed Ronald McDonald House to lease the site of the former St Catherine’s College student accommodation in Crawley. The 50-room building — to be known as Ronald McDonald House on Park — opens on Monday and will be progressively fitted out with the help of a $1.2 million Lotterywest grant. Premier Roger Cook on Sunday announced a further $2.5 million — to be included in the upcoming State Budget — to allow Ronald McDonald House to begin work on a business case for adding 100 rooms to its QEII site. That redevelopment — tripling the total number of rooms at QEII to 147 — is expected to take between three and five years, with the Crawley location to be shut once it is completed. “Two thousand families each year come to Ronald McDonald House to get the support they need for our sickest kids,” Mr Cook said. “Those kids that have to travel many miles and spend many hours, days, indeed months in Perth receiving the care they need — life-saving care.” Six-year-old Rosie Wheeler and her Goldfields family have spent more than 500 days at Ronald McDonald House as she battles acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Mum Ayla said the vital service provided much more than just a roof over their heads. “It’s given us a support network, through the staff, the volunteers, the other families we’ve met,” Ms Wheeler said. “A community that we can lean on and just somewhere we can be a family while she’s going through her treatment.” Ronald McDonald House Charities chief executive Peter King said the planned expansion would help realise his goal of ensuring no regional family requiring accommodation was turned away. “Every day we see extraordinary families who are undergoing just the most difficult times in their lives,” he said. “You have a diagnosis that isn’t great and all of a sudden, your life is uprooted and you’re in Perth,” Mr King said. “And you don’t know whether you’re going to be in Perth for days, weeks, months. or years. “It really is for many of those families a rabbit in the headlights moment. And that’s where we come in. “We take that pressure off and we hold them in place and we support their well-being while they’re going through those extraordinarily difficult times.” Mr King said work on the business case would begin “immediately” and was expected to take “a number of months”.