Wouldn’t it be good to be able to email everyone,  even those without access to the internet?  Wouldn’t it be even better if you could email them little presents that would turn up in their hands the next day?

A new service being developed by The Good Gym and Patient Opinion will do precisely this  for those with relatives in care homes.

Patient opinion has made a difference to the NHS by providing and easy mechanism for feedback, shifting the accountability of the NHS towards patients and citizens.  They have now turned their attention to care homes too.

The Good Gym was set up to provide elderly house-bound people with friendly  contact with the outside world.  We know lots of runners who like to have a mission to complete instead of running just for their own sake.

Working together, the good Gym and Patient opinion are plotting an exciting new pilot that will allow the residents of care homes to receive written letters, notes and small presents, from their friends and relatives, who will only need to write an email. The new service, the name of which is yet to be decided, will be offered to a range of a care homes in Tower Hamlets over the next month.

Residents of care homes can often be isolated and lack stimulus from the outside world.  In addition to this, Patient Opinion’s research has identified that very few care homes have internet access available to residents.  The new service will bridge the gap between a busy younger generation  and their older relatives, who  may live far away and to whom they may not get the chance to write letters.

We will be working to formalise the process over the next few months,  in the meantime,  if you have a relative in a care home in Tower Hamelts and would like to send them a message right now, send your message to mark@thegoodgym.org and we’ll have it delivered by hand by a Good Gym runner.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 2nd, 2010 at 8:48 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.