Author Archives: wendy

Kindness shown by a complete stranger

August 30, 2013   Carers, mental health

Love letters and kindness may improve mental health

By Lorna Stewart Health Check, BBC World Service

“You matter to me. In a way I cannot explain, you matter to me. And you, you are a marvel… you and all the parts of you.”

It’s not the kind of thing you normally write to a complete stranger.

But after graduating from college and moving to New York City, Hannah Brencher was feeling anxious and depressed. She found herself not wanting to be around other people and “just really unravelling”.

Then she started writing love letters to strangers and leaving them all over the city. The first letter she left on a train simply addressed: “If you find this letter then it’s for you.”

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Rooms worth remembering are set up at hospital

August 29, 2013   Alzheimer’s, Carers, dementia

FOUR pop-up 1950s living rooms worth £4,500 have been bought by Burton’s Queen’s Hospital to help elderly patients with dementia.

Thursday, August 29, 2013

Derby Telegraph

The reminiscence pods, known as RemPods, contain decade-appropriate décor, furnishings, period newspapers and magazines, a television playing recordings of old black and white shows and an old-style radio.

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    The RemPods can act as a talking point to help people with dementia.

Patients and visitors to the hospital were first shown a RemPod during national Dementia Awareness Week in May this year, when one was set up in the main corridor.

This demonstration led to Burton’s hospitals’ League of Friends’ decision to buy RemPods for the trust’s three hospital sites – Queen’s, Samuel Johnson Community Hospital, in Lichfield, and the Sir Robert Peel Community Hospital, in Tamworth – and they are due to be delivered next week.

The remaining three will go to the two other hospitals.

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Written off by Atos – I might as well die

August 28, 2013   Carers, disability

 The desperate letters from benefit cuts victims

There has been an astonishing response from readers, a deluge of personal horror stories about the Work ­Capability Assessment

 
A protester demonstrates against IT company Atos’s involvement in tests for incapacity benefits

A week ago, in this column, I told the story of Dr Greg Wood, the whistle-blower who resigned from Atos – the controversial French company paid £110 million a year to test British benefits claimants.

Dr Wood left the company after his bosses asked him to declare a person he felt was severely ill “fit for work”.

There has been an astonishing response from readers, a deluge of personal horror stories about the Work ­Capability Assessment.

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