Tools to Connect You with Friends, Families, and Neighbors
One of the biggest challenges of illness, either chronic or acute, is maintaining connections with friends, families, and neighbors. The times when you might most need help (even if it's in the form of emotional support) coincide too often with the times when it feels impossible to reach out. Fortunately, there are a number of tech resources and communities designed to facilitate the process of making these connections.
Update Sites: The best known of these is probably CaringBridge.org. Creating an account on CaringBridge is free, though the site does request support where possible via donations (my experience is that they are not annoying about it). One advantage of using CaringBridge over Facebook or other social media is that the site is set up to make it easy to limit access to only those people you've chosen to share information with.
Another update site is CarePages.com. Developed in partnership with some of the nation's largest hospitals and care centers, CarePages is free to use. A wide range of privacy settings are available; in addition, patient sites created through CarePages are only accessible to those who have created an account on the main site. CarePages.com also hosts a variety of patient discussion forums.
Care Coordination Sites: There are a few options for people looking to create online calendars and schedules for helping someone dealing with serious illness. LotsaHelpingHands.com is the most widely used of these sites; its interface is fairly intuitive, and an app is also available for mobile use. Other features on the site include an "Announcements" function, where users can post brief updates, and a "Well Wishes" section, where family and friends can post greetings and encouragement.
CareCalendar.org is another online scheduling service. It offers additional aspects inspired by the site founders' Christian faith, including some functions specifically designed to support church congregations in helping members in crisis.
Caregiver Group Training: Building on the success of the 1995 book Share the Care, by Cappy Caposella and Sheila Warnock, the Share the Caregiving organization provides resources and workshops to train and support caregiver groups.
