About Us

Welcome

Daring to Dream’s mission is to support the emotional health and wellbeing of adults in Wales living with physical illness. (That is about half of the adult population.)

Our journey started with supporting ward-based patients, their relatives and the staff who care for them by transforming a number of comfortable, comforting non-clinical safe spaces in four directorates of University Hospital of Wales.

We are now beginning to develop projects in two other health boards as well as take on new projects within Cardiff & the Vale.

We have also made a powerful beginning in terms of raising awareness of the need for emotional health support by holding our first two hugely successful, free live-streamed Wellbeing Festivals: Lleswyl 2021 – in November 2021 and Lleswyl 2023 – February 2023.

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