We are currently fundraising to purchase a new adapted holiday home. The respite home includes full wheelchair access, with widened doors and areas through the home and double patio doors that will lead onto a large veranda with a ramp, a wet room with a specialist shower chair. We intend to have track hosting fitted in the home along with a profiling bed. The home is at Milford on Sea on the edge of the new forest after having extensively researched various other locations. This is because Milford on Sea contains an accessible beach, where beach wheelchairs can be hired from the local council at Sandbanks. There are also many fully accessible attractions including Poulton’s Park, which has three wheelchair accessible rides; Longtown Farm, which has a fully accessible changing place and Beaulieu Motor Museum that is fully accessible. There is nowhere else in the UK that is this accessible.
The Lodge Park has also agreed to purchase a hoist to use in their swimming pool, which will make their park fully accessible for our complex children. The home is situated in a tranquil park. The extra space will also enable us to provide essential equipment like an Acheeva seating solution to enable our children a change of position and a mode of being wheeled out onto the veranda.
With staycations being the only form of holiday our very vulnerable children can take, due to being unable to fly, the long-term impact of COVID-19 and the lack of fully accessible accommodation, we are very keen to raise the balance of the home asap. The site is only closed for four weeks a year, meaning we could send our families during the remaining 48 weeks and provide holidays to those who have rarely had the opportunity to access them. Respite is not only essential to the disabled children, but for their siblings and their carers mental health and wellbeing.
The cost of the home is £90,000 and we have secured £50,000 leaving a shortfall of £40,000.