Author: Sue Brown CEO

MELODY – Investigating COVID-19 vaccine efficacy in immunocompromised people

A new national trial is recruiting people with rare autoimmune diseases to measure their COVID-19 antibody response following at least 3 vaccinations.

The MELODY study is recruiting immunocompromised people to determine the antibody levels they develop in response to COVID-19 vaccination.

The MELODY study aims to:

  1. Assess how many immunocompromised people have detectable antibodies against COVID-19 following at least 3 vaccines;
  2. Investigate whether a lack of detectable antibodies is associated with risk of infection over a 6-month period;
  3. Investigate what factors are associated with lack of detectable antibodies in immunocompromised people.
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A stronger voice for MSK

CEO update by Sue Brown

March has been a very impactful month for ARMA. My highlight was probably the ARMA roundtable on mental health. The statistics about incidence of mental health amongst people with musculoskeletal conditions don’t surprise me. It’s obvious why long-term pain and difficulty moving would go along with high levels of depression and anxiety. What surprises me is how little support people get with their mental well-being and that’s something ARMA is determined to change.

ARMA members will be discussing what they want to do next on mental health at this week’s members meeting.…

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Ration Watch – Surgery

ARMA has been working with the Medical Technology Group (MTG) to raise concerns about increasing rationing of joint replacement surgery.

The MTG is a coalition of patient groups, research charities and medical device manufacturers working to improve access to cost effective medical technologies for everyone who needs them. MTG has concerns about treatment rationing in general and have launched the Ration Watch campaign to highlight care inequality and the impact it has on patients’ lives.

Ration Watch aims to expose the scale of rationing and the issues around local commissioning across the UK.…

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ARMA Mental Health Roundtable

roundtable-documentIn March, ARMA held a roundtable on mental health. We brought together people from the mental and MSK health sectors, both voluntary and statutory to hear presentations from Arthritis Action, NHS England’s Head of Mental Health, a patient perspective and the Haringey IAPT service.

Improving Access to Psychological Therapies) is designed to support people with depression and anxiety but has recently been rolled out to include long term conditions. In Haringey this includes MSK pain. People are offered a range of different psychological support such as individual Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), guided self help, groups, computerised CBT.…

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CEO update – Prevention: putting MSK centre stage

Prevention seems to have been the theme of my February. The possibility that a lot of the pain and disability of MSK conditions might be prevented, and that this is being taken seriously is an exciting prospect. Even where the conditions can’t be prevented, good self-management support can make a big difference to the impact of the condition. The Government is clear that the future sustainability of the NHS depends on prevention, and that it wants to improve healthy life expectancy by at least five extra years, by 2035.…

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CEO update: Let’s all get on the bandwagon together

As I sat down to write this, NHS Chief Executive Simon Stevens was on the radio talking about plans to increase the ability of patients to see pharmacists and physios rather than a GP as their first point of contact in the NHS. Ensuring we have the right workforce to meet the growing health needs of an ageing population is a real challenge. ARMA’s different professional members have a lot to contribute, as I discovered when I spent a day at the Royal College of Chiropractors conference.…

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CEO update: The NHS Long-Term Plan – it’s what happens next that matters

NHS logo

by Sue Brown, CEO ARMA

The NHS Long-Term plan was published earlier this week. I was pleased to see quite a bit about musculoskeletal health throughout the document. There has been lots of immediate reaction, positive and negative. I think now is the time to focus on the positive, so here are my highlights.

The first reference to musculoskeletal health comes early on, (para 1.17) but seems to be mostly about frailty and older people. Great, I thought as I read this, but MSK isn’t just about older people.…

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CEO update – New Year’s resolutions

Happy New Year to all our readers.

As I write this, everyone is talking new year’s resolutions and I’m thinking about resolutions for ARMA and the MSK community.

ARMA is seeing the new year in with the start of a new strategy. We’re resolving to use this to make our work more focused and more effective, with an emphasis on collaboration and engagement. We hope that you will resolve to collaborate and engage with us. Our strength is in our membership, supporters and stakeholders – it’s by working together that we can bring about change.…

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CEO update – Exciting and uniting us

November has been a very active month for ARMA. Not just in the sense that we are doing a lot but also that a lot of it has been about physical activity, which seems to be exciting and uniting the MSK community.

The ARMA lecture featured three speakers with different perspectives on the subject. A wide range of people attended, bringing GPs into conversations with public health professionals, parkrun with sport therapists, pain specialists with the DWP, Sport England with Healthwatch.…

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Mental health and MSK rising up the agenda

CEO imageThere seems to have been a lot of mental health in my work in recent weeks. I’m pleased for two reasons. Personally, as someone who used to work for Mind it’s a subject that remains dear to my heart. But also, because this increase in mental health related activity is a sign that the mental health sector is focusing increasingly on the needs of people with long-term conditions. At the moment that’s focusing much more on conditions like diabetes or cardiovascular disease.…

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