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Uplifted Youth

Support Us

Volunteer Your Skills

If you'd like to volunteer your skills or services, please contact us to discuss your ideas.

Donate Online

You can donate directly via PayPal, or start fundraising for your local healthcare service to receive printed booklets.

Sign Up to the VIP List

Sign your group or organisation up to our VIP List and spread the word about the CHCP and receive booklets to distribute.

How to Get Involved

Though we are not currently a registered charity, My Chronic Healthcare Passport operates as a non-profit organisation, in accordance with our published values and mission statement.

 

The standard and accessible editions of the Chronic Health & Care Passport are free to download (and we will strive to keep this the case going forward), but donations would help tremendously in our aim to make MCHCP available in hospitals, doctor's surgeries, clinics, hospices, and social care settings for people who are unable to access them any other way.

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1 - Donations

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Your donations would be used to help us print batches of MCHCP to deliver to health and social care settings who have identified their patients as being in need. This may be due to restricted access to internet and home printing because of severe illness or disability, terminal illness, or may be because they are from a lower socioeconomic background, have no fixed address, lack the required IT skills, need support with language or accessibility, or need help and encouragement to engage with their healthcare options.

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Any money that could not be used in this way would be donated to the Open Medicine Foundation, whose pioneering biomedical research into M.E/CFS could lead to significant advances in care for patients of many autoimmune and post-viral illnesses. Due to the emergence of Long Covid this subset of patients is likely to grow exponentially, and studies have shown that patients with M.E/CFS have some of the poorest quality of life measurements amongst any chronically ill group.[1]

 

Personal health limitations mean that energetic fundraising campaigns and marathons are not viable, and all the costs we have incurred in creating MCHCP have been funded ourselves, from very meagre personal income. This isn't sustainable long term, though we have attempted to keep costs as low as possible by utilising free hosting options, trial versions of software, and not batch-printing in advance. We eventually hope to cover our running costs (and possibly even pay our contributors) by selling accessories and themed PDF versions of MCHCP from an online shop in the future, but for now we're just having to keep things small and rely on our own skills and occasional input from philanthropic volunteers.

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If you'd prefer to donate to our running costs rather than the outreach projects, you can do so, here. The option is also available from a drop-down menu via our main donation buttons.

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2 - Fundraising

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If you'd like to fundraise to help us then that would be wonderful. If you want to raise money to have printed booklets supplied to a particular healthcare organisation or charity then please check with them first, and make sure that they wish to receive them. You'll then need to contact us so that we can make it official and we'll share your campaign's progress on our social media accounts and our Fundraising page.

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Your fundraiser could be to help us print booklets for a specific group of patients, or to help toward the cost of making additional accessible versions or improving the accessibility of the website.

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3 - Skills & Support

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We're a very small team of currently unpaid but very enthusiastic volunteers. That's helped us get MCHCP up and running but we've been forced to do it all with limited skills, software, and resources. Perhaps you're a graphic designer with a few tips for us? Or maybe your company's software could help us create our fillable forms and other printables more easily.

If you run a company or organisation that would like to help out, either with printing, software, spreading the word, or just the eye-watering supply of teabags that fuel the whole operation, then please do
get in touch.

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References
 

1: From the ME Association:

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  • Studies that have examined functional status and quality of life measures (Buchwald et al 1996; Hvidberg et al 2015; Komaroff et al 1996; Nacul et al 2011a; Schweitzer et al 1995; Winger et al 2015 – in adolescents) also confirm that the scale of impairment across a range of physical and mental activities can be just as great or greater than in many other chronic medical conditions.

  • One study, from Nacul et al (2011a) in the UK, reported that:

 “ME/CFS is as disabling and has a greater impact on functional status and well-being than other chronic diseases such as cancer. The emotional burden of ME/CFS is felt by lay carers as well as by people with ME/CFS.” 

  • The high level of disability associated with ME/CFS often stems from a combination of symptoms such as fatigue, pain, orthostatic intolerance, sleep disturbance, cognitive impairment and, in some cases, an associated depression.

  • Another study, published in 2017, showed that people with ME or CFS were significantly more disabled in terms of functional ability while at the same time showing little difference in role emotional or mental health, compared to people with multiple sclerosis.

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References
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Image by Nick Fewings
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