About Us

Welcome

Daring to Dream’s mission is to support the emotional health and wellbeing of patients, aged 16 years and over, who are under the care of hospital clinics across Wales.

Our journey has begun with a primary (but not exclusive) focus in supporting ward-based patients within the geographical area covered by Cardiff & the Vale University Health Board, by transforming a number of comforting non-clinical spaces in four directorates. We have also made a powerful beginning in terms of raising awareness of the need for emotional support by holding our first-ever (hugely successful) live-streamed Wellbeing Festival – Lleswyl 2021 – in November 2021.         

Critical, chronic, and life-shortening health conditions are hugely emotionally demanding of all patients. This emotional demand is on top of the immense physical ones generated by the ill-health itself. Therefore, as a patient, in order to respond as well as possible on a physical level to our personal health challenges, it is essential that we also dig deep emotionally.

By supporting the emotional well-being of patients, Daring to Dream adds value to the clinical expertise, care and medical interventions provided by the specialist teams.

We wish to support patients as they move into a position where they manage their condition, rather than having their condition manage them.

We want to help patients dare to dream that their life can still be full of making their sometimes seemingly impossible dreams really happen.

Below is a video of Neil Hopper, Consultant Vascular Surgeon at Royal Cornwall Hospitals Trust in conversation with Dr Nav Masani, Consultant Cardiologist at University Hospital of Wales.

Neil shares his own extraordinary and inspirational patient experience and discusses how this has changed his view (as a consultant surgeon) about the emotional impact on patients of serious illness.

We hope you too will dig deep and become part of our mission.

Thank you so much for your support.
Barbara Chidgey
Chair, Daring to Dream