Category Archives: disability

Bolton man with motor neurone disease ‘banks’ his voice

March 8, 2011   disability, health, motor neurone

Bolton man with motor neurone disease ‘banks’ his voice

A man from Bolton who has motor neurone disease (MND) is recording his words so his baby son will be able to hear his voice.

Laurence Brewer was diagnosed with MND – a progressive condition that damages the nervous system – in 2008.

Mr Brewer, 43, has already lost much of his mobility. Concerned that his speech could be next, he went online and discovered a speech synthesis programme called ModelTalker which allows him to record his speech patterns

The driving force behind it is Mr Brewer’s 13-month-old son, Stan.

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Go ON Adopt a Care Home

March 8, 2011   disability, health, internet, Uncategorized

Go ON Adopt a Care Home

March 8, 2011
With 6 million older people currently offline and around 450,000 care home residents in the UK, Go ON Adopt a Care Home has just launched to utilise the brilliant skills of young Digital Champions.
The inspiration of Lilla Harris, former nurse and care home manager and founder of the award winning finerday.com, Go ON Adopt is encouraging every school in the UK to “adopt” a local care home or sheltered housing scheme, to help engage residents in the wonderful world of the web.  For Lilla, it’s the logical next step after Finerday, which she developed after witnessing the dwindling number of letters and photos older people received.  She realised that “the world was moving online and leaving older people more and more isolated.”
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NHS reforms will return health service to 1930s

March 7, 2011   Arthritis, Cancer, dementia, disability, health, mental health, Multiple Sclerosis, Older care

NHS reforms will return health service to 1930s

The government’s NHS reforms will return medical care to the standards of the 1930s and 40s, a leading doctor has warned.

By Laura Roberts 8:00AM GMT 07 Mar 2011
Dr Mark Porter, chairman of the BMA’s hospital consultant committee, said proposed changes would create an “increasingly tattered safety net” for people suffering from complex illnesses such as heart failure, diabetes or obesity.

He claimed that for patients in some parts of the country, care would return to “what we thought we had left behind when we founded the NHS in 1948”.

Private healthcare firms could “cherry pick” patients with the simplest conditions to treat while local hospitals could face closure if they are forced to compete with independent, profit-driven healthcare providers, he said.

This would leave the NHS as a “provider of last resort” for patients denied treatment by private practises because their conditions are too expensive to deal with.

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