Muddy Care is an educational rehabilitation service for people with chronic conditions and LONG COVID.
The innovative community that is Muddy Care has been designed and developed by a professional teacher and outdoor education specialist who also lives with chronic conditions herself. Muddy Care offers learning tools, strategies, educational exercises and activities to enhance all areas of holistic health and wellbeing specific to chronic conditions and LONG COVID. Our rehabilitation services are led, designed, delivered and reviewed by professional teachers and specialists in outdoor education.
The success of the long-term rehabilitation programme and the enquiries Muddy Care was getting from the chronic condition community, led to the Muddy Care Education Team writing and designing a series of short courses in 2020 which will start in 2021.
Our long-term rehabilitation programme continues and these participants have currently been with us for 16 months (as of December 2020). Our testimonials from them show what a significant impact Muddy Care has had on them as individuals. They have become in every sense of the word ‘a community’. They are also involved in the development of Muddy Care and some are also starting to help and advise others with chronic conditions through our various services. They will have the opportunity to progress to become ‘Muddy Liaison Officers’ when they graduate from our long-term rehabilitation programme in 2021. Our Liaison Officers will work with the education team in supporting participants through our various services.
We are also very happy to announce that in 2021 we will be delivering bespoke educational rehabilitation programmes to individuals and we will be holding our first Muddy Care bespoke residential in the Summer of 2021.
Last but by no means least, we are also now offering our services to those with LONG COVID. This includes an individual bespoke level and through our short course programme. It is an incredibly lonely, uncertain and frightening time when your life gets turned upside down and inside out by a traumatic event, but Muddy Care is here to support you. And in case you haven’t picked up on this yet by reading our website, the CEO of Muddy Care’s life was turned upside down by a virus that significantly damaged her heart in 2011. She went into the start of heart failure in 2012. Claire was a 37-year-old retired GB athlete too. Viruses do not discriminate.
Please have a look at our website. We are an educational, not-for-profit community interest company, led by professional outdoor teachers and education managers. You will find a wealth of knowledge and inspirational stories and prose on our website. Please look at our Latest News, Muddy Jukebox, Muddy Stories and COVID pages to see what we do and to hear from our Muddy participants. We are here to help and support the chronic condition and now LONG COVID communities.
Before we continue, we thought it was only right to tell you about how Muddy Care all began. Mostly from the bedroom of our CEO because she was so ill…
They say there are three ways to deal with adversity.
1. You give in and let the fire of adversity consume you.
2. You fight to reach the other side and make it.
3. You stay in the fire and everything that it represents and that becomes your whole focus, utterly and completely.
What Claire has learnt from being so ill for so long, is that these three phases are not mutually exclusive. People with chronic conditions can experience all three as their journey is for so long and at times absolutely soul destroying, physically and emotionally.
Muddy Care was born out of adversity, Claire’s adversity. As an experienced teacher in geographical and outdoor education and as someone who had always been keen to participate in outdoor recreation activities, professionally and recreationally, including at an elite level, for someone who had always considered health and wellness a priority, Claire was shocked and appalled at the level of rehabilitation services and their quality for people suffering with chronic illnesses who do not fall under the umbrella of brain injuries, spinal injuries or who are eligible for assistance from the British Heart Foundation. The irony of this is that medical care is often excellent to outstanding. Claire’s medical care certainly is excellent. However, when it comes to rehabilitation services, particularly for auto immune diseases, Claire was utterly and completely let down by the system. It is fair to say that she had to manage her own adversity with the tools she had accumulated over her life from her professional outdoor education background, elite sports background, from her inner fire, her friends and family and her super canine partner extraordinaire Pebble. She knew her journey to improve her health and wellness under such challenging circumstances was neither right nor fair.
In 2015, Claire began to write Muddy Care as a mechanism to help resolve this issue. The issue is much larger than Muddy Care itself but Muddy Care can be an invaluable cog in the system. However, in 2016 things changed for Claire significantly. After multiple serious relapses, she was told her conditions were chronic. She was beyond devastated. She realised then just how important it was for Muddy Care to exist because there must be so many ‘Claire’s’ out there feeling how she did in 2016.
When Claire was given that chronic label, psychologically there was a huge shift in her. Up until 2016 she believed she could still be fixed, that she could get back parts of her life pre illness, not completely, but some of it. She knew she was going to be ill for a long time (a few years) but she hadn’t digested the possibility of being ill, perhaps for the rest of her life. In 2016, she realised that until a treatment plan could be found for her rare conditions, which was unlikely any time soon, this was now her reality, and that of many others. And her reality was extremely challenging; physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually and socially. So in 2016, Muddy Care picked up momentum, mostly from her bedroom as she was so poorly.
Claire in hospital on one of the relapse vacations
Claire extremely poorly. She almost went into renal failure with this relapse
Muddy Care uses the principles of the six best doctors:
Sunshine - Water - Rest - Air - Exercise - Diet
With a lot of care, support and empathy thrown in.
Muddy Care has many unique selling points. First of all, it has been designed and developed by someone who has several chronic conditions herself, is a qualified teacher and a specialist in outdoor, geographical, blue and green education and care and also has a sound understanding in health and wellbeing.
For those of you not familiar with these terms, blue represents water environments such as the sea and green represents land environments such as green open spaces. Care refers to the activities that are carried out and the support that Muddy Care provides. Each of the activities and learning exercises has relevance to an area of health and wellbeing.
The founder and author of Muddy Care competed for Great Britain for four years, prior to becoming ill. She is also a very well-respected professional in environmental and outdoor education and prior to getting ill in 2011, was extremely fit and active; co-leading outdoor expeditions, paddling rivers, lakes and seas, climbing hills and mountains, skiing and cycling. Through her own illness journey, now for over nine years, in addition to her professional background and qualifications, she has carried out significant additional research for nine years into holistic health and wellbeing in relation to chronic conditions.
Additional educational staff who are involved in programme development and delivery have extensive professional experience and expertise in outdoor recreation, education, blue and green learning and care. The joint lead educational manager is also a retired Great British athlete as well as a professional educationalist in outdoor learning.
Secondly, people with chronic conditions themselves have contributed to the design and themes of the Muddy Care programme and community and our participants on the long-term rehabilitation programme form our Advisory panel. They play a critical role in advising The Directors of Muddy Care.
Thirdly, Muddy Care embraces collaboration, co-production, and communication with different but complimentary professional sectors; health, medical, business and education and other professional third-party organisations in green and blue care to integrate best practice into the programme. These people and organisations form our Steering group. All these factors and people have contributed to the community that Muddy Care has built, will continue to build and its' ethos.
Muddy Care helps those with chronic conditions and LONG COVID explore new possibilities for their future and will become an invaluable source of support for each person through the community that Muddy Care is. As Claire likes to quote,
“Anytime you see a turtle up on a fence post, you know he had some help”
“Claire today, 2020. In stable health (albeit with challenges), happy and outside in her Welsh paradise, where she feels most at home. She may have more crows feet around her eyes than she would like 😏 from all her medical trauma, but Muddy Care has led her to finding her true purpose in life. And that is a fantastic gift.”
All of us need help at some stage in our lives.
After three years of planning and preparation, the team that has become Muddy Care, finally secured funding for Phase A from the Welsh Government Rural Communities - Rural Development Programme 2014-2020, the Brecon Beacons Natural Park Sustainable Development Fund and The National Lottery. And they are a team. Claire couldn’t have done this alone.