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News and events index

Tuesday, October 3, 2017

A real Liferaft story

Liferaft is a practical online toolkit developed to help and benefit everyone involved in managing complex health and social needs. When individuals face complex health and social challenges, the demands on them and those around them are often extraordinary. For them, extraordinary life becomes an ordinary life. Liferaft makes everyday life simpler by changing the way complex lives are organised. It helps you to store and manage all the information you need, in one online easily accessible and reliable location. With your permission, all the people who care for and about you can view and contribute to your Liferaft support system anytime, anywhere.

A real Liferaft story

There are no typical days in the Aspland household. Debs and Chris have three children, Kane 12, and twins Rosie and Jamie 11. Kane is autistic and has hydrocephalus, Rosie has delayed speech and learning and Jamie is blind and autistic. They require three different care plans, three sets of professional helpers and three different schools. Debs uses Liferaft to keep a track of appointments, treatments and results. She finds the built in calendar feature superb; it helps her to manage all of their overlapping schedules easily. As Jamie prepares to move school, building his profile on Liferaft to share with the new assistants has proved indispensable and eased the stress of transition. It has helped Debs and Jamie as well as helping the new teachers feel prepared and confident when Jamie arrives. Each of the children’s assistants use Liferaft to review their activity every time they work with one of the children. When one assistant leaves and another takes over, as is often the case, the handover is much easier and more thorough.

Debs shared a great tip about setting up Liferaft: she and Chris asked other family members and people in the children’s wider care circles (teachers and assistants) to list three things they liked about each child, three things they thought were important to the child and three things they do to support them. Each child then chose which of these observations they wanted to put on their profile to share with others. This really helps everyone around the children to see them as individuals and to feel involved in their lives. For Debs, “one thing I really like is that Liferaft doesn’t impose labels. Each child is seen as the unique character they are, with their likes and dislikes, their achievements and challenges.”

Liferaft was created by Nicola Murgatroyd, a mother and successful business-woman, because she knew that it is a much needed resource for people like her. “For twenty-eight years I cared for my disabled daughter, it was richly rewarding and I wouldn’t have swapped that time with her for anything other than her becoming healthy. I’ve had first-hand experience of how exhausting it can be and I know there is precious little help out there. I saw the opportunity to create a system that could keep all the information relating to the care of someone, from several different people and sources, in one central place. It is a simple online tool to hold, share and manage care and health information. Ultimately I want to change the way we care, for ourselves and for everyone.”

We are still running our exclusive promotion to celebrate the partnership between Special Needs UK and Liferaft offering you access to Liferaft’s Premium Account for FREE. Just use the following promotional code when you sign up SNUK06. The code is valid until 30th November and gives you 6 months free access.

For more information on how Liferaft can help you, please visit our website here

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