Celebrating progress

2021 has been a year of progress for ARMA and for MSK. We know that all our readers will be feeling exhausted. This has been a tough year for anyone working in health. It has also been the year when MSK began to get the profile it deserves with the new Best MSK Health programme in England and development of a new MSK Framework and clinical leads in Wales. We all know that we need to do things differently, that the pandemic has only made worse those problems that already existed. There is now a momentum behind the drive for change, the desire to do things differently, to work together for the best possible MSK health services.

ARMA ends the year with more members and more associate members. As the year draws to a close, things we have been working on hurtle towards the finish line. All of them emphasise ARMA’s core strength – collaboration. Everything we know about the complexity of MSK health tells us collaboration is essential to improving MSK services.

Our new pain resources have just been published – a policy position paper and a “core offer” for pain services. The core offer sets out what we think should be available in every area to deliver high quality support to people living with pain. None of it can be implemented without collaboration, so the new statutory ICSs being established in England are ideally placed to lead on this.

Of course, there is our virtual conference on 6 December. If anything, the speakers are more diverse than last year’s event, including a health psychologist, the Chief Operating Officer of a GP Federation, and a social prescriber. Collaboration is an inevitable focus.

Look out also for the report of our recent roundtable on MSK and health inequalities, which should be published in the next few days. This event brought together a wide range of participants from inside and outside of the MSK world to look at how we might tackle the significant inequalities in MSK health. One of the strong recommendations was collaboration with the communities most affected.

The ARMA team will be taking a well-earned break across the festive season, returning in January to launch our new guide for social prescribers and to ensure that all this year’s work has impact and makes a difference. I look forward to collaborating with you all on this.

Meanwhile, I wish you all season’s greetings and let’s take the chance to celebrate the progress we have made this year.