Meningitis Research Foundation's telephone befriending network enables us to put people who have recently been affected by the trauma of meningitis or septicaemia in touch with a trained befriender who has had a similar experience of the diseases to their own.
In 2000, Meningitis Research Foundation was delighted to have been awarded a three-year grant from Children in Need to help fund a new National Befriender Training Programme. The programme was then generously supported by the Big Lottery for a further three years.
As a result, we now have a network of trained befrienders within our membership department who are able to offer ongoing telephone befriending support to others. All of these befrienders have a range of experiences of meningitis and septicaemia, some have lost someone to the disease, others have had someone close to them recover and some have recovered themselves from the disease.
Many people find it extremely helpful to talk to someone else who has had a similar experience of meningitis and septicaemia to their own. Joanna was put in touch with Jeni (pictured right with Joanna) after losing her teenage son to the disease. Jeni became a trained befriender after her daughter died in 1995. As Joanna said:
'Jeni was able to share her experience with me which helped me to understand that my feelings were totally natural and that allowed me to deal with them. But the biggest single benefit Jeni brought me was light at the end of a very dark tunnel. Telephone befriending has been good for me and I believe it can be good for others too.'
If you would like to be put in touch with a trained befriender or you think that you would like to offer telephone befriending support to
someone else and would be interested in becoming a befriender for the Foundation, please do not hesitate to contact us at any time on the Freefone 24 hour helpline.
Our telephone befriending programme now has over 140 trained volunteer befrienders, and has Approved Provider Standard from the Mentoring and Befriending Foundation - a government accreditation.
We are currently looking at the telephone befriender programme as a whole and trying to identify ways it can be taken forward and developed further. And we need your help to get a true picture of the programme. We have devised questionnaires to be sent out to anyone who has requested or given befriending over the past five years. We hope that from this we will gain further insights into the benefits of the befriending relationships.
Page last updated 02.05.08