It’s taken dozens of interviews, conversations and consultations, hundreds of survey responses, umpteen articles, reports and books and numerous conferences… and finally we have something to show for it all! Our all new My Future Care Handbook is now available, a fully comprehensive and interactive workbook to help people think about, make and share decisions around their future care.
Originally we set out to produce a guidance tool for health care professionals to help them initiate conversations around advance care planning. However, a major part of Mycarematters' mission is to empower and engage individuals so as to enable them to take an active role in their own care. It therefore quickly became clear that we should first and foremost be putting this information into the individual’s hands. It needed to be a jargon-free easy read, taking an unthreatening and straightforward approach to what can, for some people, be a challenging topic. Our reviewers think we have got it right:
“Lovely clear, step by step guidance to follow” “It is user friendly, simple and not intimidating”
During our research we learned just how difficult everyone finds it to broach the subject of end-of-life care. Strange, isn’t it, when it’s the one thing that is going to happen to absolutely all of us? And by not discussing how, where and with whom we wish to spend our last days, whether it is quality or quantity of time that is more important to us, we leave our families in an awkward position of not being sure what we’d have wanted, when we may have lost our capacity to make decisions for ourselves. It is said that a good death means a good bereavement, and who would want to make it even harder than it already is for their family?
By providing clear and concise information with practical tasks, action lists and forms to complete, the Handbook offers a gentle and unthreatening way to start a really important conversation. After all, despite some people’s belief to the contrary, talking about it really doesn’t make it more likely to happen!
Our research also revealed how much confusion there is about the decisions available to us regarding later life generally. So we set out to cover all the topics that we might want to consider as we approach our later life, with the focus just as much on how we can live well as how we might die well. By making it relevant even to those of us who have yet to face our own mortality, it encourages us to start thinking about these issues much earlier than tends to be the case.
We found a lot of wonderful materials both online and in printed form, but none that put it all together, in an easy-to-use format, so our goal was to provide a resource that covers it all, and here, again, our reviewers are approving:
"It is so comprehensive and an absolute mine of useful information. It will be really helpful to have all of this information in one place…” “There is so much useful information in it!” "I really like this and the way you have pulled everything together. There's nothing else out there that does anything like this."
We offer bulk prices for health and social care organisations, hospices, care homes, home care services and community organisations running events such as death cafes, with the option of creating bespoke versions in your own branding if you wish.
Mycarematters 2020 CIC is a not-for-profit social enterprise so all revenue is invested into developing and delivering new and existing products and services to improve people's experience of care.
