Optus sponsors Livewire social networking for sick kids

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 08 September 2009 01:55

IT Industry - Strategy

"These young people often experience unique challenges based on their illness or disability and treatment regimes – challenges which can lead to feelings of severe isolation, boredom and a lack of control over their daily lives. With a full suite of community tools, including chat, blogs and forums, Livewire is a fun place for young Australians to hang out and provide invaluable support for each other."

He told iTWire: "We started with the Livewire on Wheels programme at Randwick Children's Hospital last year. Since then we have evolved the design of the trolleys and extended the bedside programme to 'loan of laptops' which is a much more convenient way to access the programme for some."

Livewire was launched in February by communications minister Stephen Conroy. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Starlight Children's Foundation but has been funded with $7.2m under the Australian Government's Clever Networks programme.

Its aim at launch was to connect 20,000 young people, siblings and parents by the end of 2009. To do this it planned to work with and through other not for profit organisations, such as The Spastic Centre and Diabetes Australia. Khalifa said the programme now had some 13,000 member children and some 20 partner organisations.

At the time of launch, Livewire on Wheels, had already been rolled out at Canberra Hospital and The Sydney Children's Hospital at Randwick. The aim was to provide Livewire on wheels in a further seven hospitals around Australia including The Children's Hospital at Westmead, John Hunter Hospital in Newcastle, Princess Margaret Hospital for Children in Perth, Mater Hospital in Brisbane, Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital, and Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne.

Khalifa said that, with the Optus sponsorship he hoped to extend rollout of the trolleys to a further 26 hospitals over the two years of the partnership. Optus will also promote the programme with advertising to help build awareness The primary means of Internet access is WiFi and where hospitals have WiFi the programme will use those. For smaller hospitals, Optus 3G access is used.

Optus will not put a dollar value on its sponsorship but said it would be making "a significant investment" in the programme and would be one of its biggest community partners.

Research, conducted by Dr Amanda Third and Dr Ingrid Richardson from Murdoch University's Centre for Everyday Life (CEL) claims to have found that, for young Australians living with a serious illness, chronic health condition or disability, access to online content, blogs and the ability to meet new friends via online chat and social networking can help form strong friendships that, in most cases, are more important than their friendships offline.

Dr Third, a senior lecturer/director of CEL, said: "We found that despite the fact these young Australians have never met each other, and do not know each other in the real world, their online friendships are central to their wellbeing and the fact that they have each other is a really important part of their daily life."