An Oxford computer firm has pledged to raise £45,000 to sponsor a resource room on the surgical floor of the Oxford Children's Hospital, due to open in January next year.

John Chelsom, managing director of the CSW Group, which provides electronic systems for managing health records, felt compelled to become involved in the fundraising campaign after meeting families who had first-hand experience of the existing hospital facilities and whose own fundraising efforts had already raised millions for the campaign.

The new Oxford Children's Hospital, at the John Radcliffe complex in Headington, will provide purpose-built, family-friendly facilities for inpatient and outpatient children's services in the city for the first time.

Mr Chelsom, whose firm is based at Oxford Business Park, said: "The Children's Hospital will be a magnificent facility and CSW is proud to be supporting it.

"Apart from contributing to such an obviously good cause, we have found that our fundraising activities have been great for team building across the company."

The decision to raise money for the Resource Room seemed a natural fit as CSW is a leading provider of products for electronic health records management, and integration with web-based knowledge resources.

CSW and the Oxford Radcliffe Hospitals NHS Trust have a long history of working in partnership. CSW and the medical IT team at the ORH first worked together in 1994 on the award-winning Oxford Clinical Intranet, the hospital's staff website.

Since then, this has been extended, using CSW's products, to improve storage of electronic patient records and applications benefiting clinical staff.

The resource room will enable clinical staff to use educational resources and web-based information, ensuring that clinical practice is evidence-based and up-to-date.

The resource room will house books, journals and computers with a study area.

CSW will raise the money at fundraising events and by encouraging employees to make donations through the Payroll Giving system, under which money is donated before taxation.

The Government matches the first £10 of employee donations for the first six months and donates £500 for each business joining the scheme.

A charity committee, headed by CSW's chairman Richard Stone, has been set up to encourage the participation of everyone in the company in the fundraising drive.