What can you do if you have a health condition which changes from day to day and week to week?
One day you may feel fine and the next you may feel unable to move with exhaustion, or your eyesight or your joint movements may be suddenly worse.
How can you manage your life positively and help others to understand the impact of the condition?
How can such a condition affect your morale and confidence?
These and many other questions are among those which people living with Sickle Cell have to contend with regularly. Coaching can support an individual’s confidence about who they are, what they want for themselves and how they can achieve this. Working with two outstanding individuals with the condition who raised Result CIC’s awareness of this challenging condition and we decided to bid for funding to support a group of people living with Sickle Cell.
Result CIC is happy to announce that it has been successful in securing funding from The Big Lottery’s Awards for All to run a new development programme for people living with Sickle Cell. We are delighted to be partnering with Central Manchester University Hospitals Foundation Trust’s Sickle Cell and Thalassaemia Service centre on this project.
June 19th is Sickle Cell awareness day. Awareness of the condition is often low, even among the families and communities of people who live with the condition. People can feel isolated as a result and develop mental health issues. These can exacerbate the physical challenges they have to deal with.
Genetically, Sickle Cell is predominant among people of African descent and also Hispanic, Mediterranean and Middle Eastern people. In some cases people living with the condition may experience a ‘double prejudice’ linked to both their health condition and their ethnic identity.
Our project is aimed to support people with Sickle Cell to increase awareness of their capabilities and strengths. The process is to encourage them to start focusing on what they can do rather than what they can’t.
One of our previous clients has talked about how coaching helped her make a slight shift in thinking. This led to her changing the way she dealt with the pain and fatigue and ensuring as a result she achieved more periods of increased energy. She also talked about how with increased confidence she started communicating about her condition further, importantly being able to highlight what she needed in order to function. She helped inspire us to develop this project and will be working alongside us on it.
If you are interested in learning more about this condition, the Sickle Cell Society has more information.
Inspired by this project? Why not get in touch to talk about your own ideas?