Tell us your equipment related stories!

Everyone, at some point in their lives, knows someone who has used disability equipment of some sort. No doubt you will have heard of good experiences, but you will also have heard of the not so good. You may have heard of a child waiting long periods for equipment, or someone not able to be discharged from hospital because of equipment delays. On the positive side you may have heard where equipment has allowed someone to communicate, or to live and lead a relatively normal life.

Our CEO recently wrote a blog post about his next door neighbour, which generated significant interest – see HERE. This blog highlighted the importance of equipment, as well as the lack of integrated working across all care services, waste in administration and money, and an appalling experience received by the end user.

The importance of disability equipment is often not fully understood or appreciated.

We often hear about strategies for early intervention & prevention, hospital discharges, re-ablement and rehabilitation services, moving more care into the community etc., with little reference to the equipment needed to achieve them.

Disability equipment has many purposes and can be used for example as a temporal aid following an operation, to allow people to live independent lives or to communicate, or to be kept alive. If disability equipment is commissioned and provided right, many positive and good quality outcomes can be achieved.

We would like you to share your stories with us – the good and the bad, so that we can generate more evidence to help us in our quest to raise awareness of the importance of equipment, and to improve service standards nationally.

Please post your cases below or to: info@cecops.org.uk and title them ‘Case Examples’. Feel free to anonymise the characters, but it would be helpful to have your name and details. If we want to post your case example on our website, we will contact you beforehand to seek you permission. Thank you in advance.