Community Wellbeing Service

[Amanda_George]

I hope it's OK to put this here, but we've just had an amazing lady come to the house to talk to me an' 'im about ways we can BOTH be helped, both mentally and physically.

It's called the Community Wellbeing Service and you can refer yourself as long as you're over 16.

She gave us both a leaflet about it and the number on the front for self-referrals is 0300 131 0024.

She's given us both places to go to for support, there's a community cafe that is not only wheelchair accessible but they cater for Vegans too (apparently their vegan cakes are heavenly and they do a Sunday roast for only £1 each).  You have to book so that they can get the ramp out and the dairy free milk in and stuff.  She's given Steve a couple of URLs for local services and she's going to make referrals to various places like money places, OT, Let's Talk, Community Connections etc but it's all moving forward for us now.  If it's available here in Gloucester then hopefully there's something similar around your area too?!

You can totally self-refer to it so you don't have to go through the council or your GP or social services or whatever, just phone them and ask how to self-refer then they will come to your house and do whatever they can to help you and refer you to all sorts of places and stuff!

[Pip]

They are good and last year they did 2 lots of 8 weeks of wellbeing sessions at a church near where we live.  It was interesting and got to talk about all sorts of things such as healthy eating, exercise and walking groups.  It was also fun so we made knew friends as well as meeting up with friends.  We took Cassie along sometimes which was hilarious as she had to say "hello" to everybody and one week it was an exercise session which she thought was great fun to join in with.

We've had different people in our home which included being told about different things we are entitled to as carers for each other.  We also had a well being lady for a few months to go through different things. She, Rick and I went out for weekly walks and Rick sometimes went out jogging with her when he was up to it.

[Amanda_George]

Apparently there's somewhere around here that we can take the pup to, walk around for an hour or whatever then come home.  Initially just the two of us and the pup, but there are regular dog walks around there too if we feel able/want to in future.

There's so much available very locally (as in opposite my GP which is easy walking distance for most people, just not us right now) and Steve's got the names of a couple of places and we're being referred to other places, so it was well worth the almost 2 hours she was here!