The team at Mobility Compare received an interesting email this week.  We were challenged to live for one week with a disability.

Could we do it?  Would we survive?  We’re not sure, although there’s no question this blog would be put on hold for the week that’s for sure.

It was an interesting proposition though and made us think.  After all, it’s one thing to be on crutches for a year after an accident but altogether a different proposition if you are permanently disabled.

On a related point, Heather Mills recently revealed she is working on a TV documentary about people living with disabilities alongside her Dancing On Ice partner Matt Evers.  The charity campaigner, speaking on This Morning, said she would like to get celebrities involved in the TV project.

“I want to get people like you Eamonn [Holmes, the presenter] and get you to spend a week in a wheelchair. To see what it’s like to live with a disability. You would have to be looked after and pushed around by your wife.”

Whether that’s a slip of the tongue we can’t tell, because Ms Mills definitely has ‘previous’ in the ‘pushed around by your wife’ category.

We also smiled when she said, “We would get a chef like Gordon Ramsay, blindfold him, and put him in the kitchen for a week.”  We can picture it now – Ms Mills in the director’s chair and Mr Ramsay blindfold in the kitchen.  Cue ‘knife’, ‘chopping’, ‘dicing’ and a swift Old Bailey trial.

Kitchen knife

However, we think this idea is rather ingenious if it highlights what it is like to be one of the 8 million British disabled – in fact we think it’s a cracking idea.  Certainly better than most of the tosh served up on terrestrial TV.

One of the most common conditions she could cover is losing the use of a hand.  Temporary one-handedness can affect people of any age, but for the elderly it is more likely to cause lasting or permanent problems.

Hopefully the new series will also cover the many new innovations that can help with conditions like one handedness and keep people independent in their own homes.   For instance, a simple tool for coping with buttons and zips, a single handed tray, a guard to keep food on plates, a chopping board that holds food in place etc.

Basically we’d like a series that has its human interest side but also an informative side that really helps the disabled.  On that note, research undertaken by Homecare from The Consortium (www.homecare-products.co.uk), a new online shop to help people live life to the full at home as they grow older, has indentified the twelve most common conditions that affect the elderly, including one-handedness.

The site has many new advanced products that offer excellent features and good value for a range of disabilities and there is an on-line occupational therapist to help with queries.  Well worth a visit, as is Mobility Compare, our own comparison website.

As for living with a disability for a week…..watch this space.