Garreth | Arthritis and Musculoskeletal Alliance

Guest Blog: From desk to home caring – backs are a problem!

by Stuart Blackman, CEO of BackCare

I am really enjoying working with BackCare as the new Chief Executive. We are at the cusp of a new phase of development of the charity. BackCare is the UK’s national back pain charity, founded 1968 – our mission is to turn the tide on back pain, the world’s leading cause of human disability. We do this through research, education and outreach initiatives.

Our new website is now the primary platform through which we can reach out to our key stakeholders: patients, clinicians, researchers, educators and our corporate supporters.…

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Guest Blog: Fracture Liaison Services

By Anne Thurston, Health Sector Relations Manager, National Osteoporosis Society

This week, 18 months’ worth of furious activity finally came together in the launch of our Fracture Liaison Service (FLS) resources. This makes me so happy that I can’t think of it without doing a happy dance in my head!

Let’s start at the beginning. A Fracture Liaison Service is simply a dedicated co-ordinator whose sole purpose it is to find people who are aged over 50 years and have broken a bone.

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Guest Blog: Getting it Right First Time

by Mike Kimmons CB, Chief Executive, British Orthopaedic Association

On Monday 16 March, the BOA launched the Getting It Right First Time (GIRFT) report. GIRFT was commissioned in 2013 by the Secretary of State for Health and NHS England and published with their agreement. Evidence-based and solutions-oriented, the GIRFT team used multiple sources to compile a unique data set for each NHS Hospital Trust in England that provides elective orthopaedic services and constructed comparative performance dashboards with the objective of benchmarking good practice.

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Guest Blog: The Need for Competency-Based Commissioning

by Matthew Bennett, President, British Chiropractic Association

As we all know back pain is the single biggest cause of disability in the UK according to the Global Burden of Disease Report. Despite this huge cost both in human and financial terms, care can often appear to be disjointed. In 2009 NICE published guidelines on the Management of persistent non-specific low back pain but many regions in the UK still struggle to implement the guidance and with many different providers being involved in the management of back pain an integrated approach is elusive.

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Guest Blog: What the ARMA Manifesto means for me

by Ella Vine, Chief Executive, FibroAction It was a pleasure to attend last week’s ARMA parliamentary reception, an event with expert speakers and healthcare professionals on the subject of musculoskeletal conditions. The event was well attended and it was good to see that some MPs are genuinely interested in the cause and support the 2015 ARMA Manifesto. Lord Hunt, the Deputy Leader of the Opposition, has spoken about the challenges lying ahead of us to improve the diagnosis and care of MSK conditions and addressed all six points of ARMA’s Manifesto.…

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Guest Blog: Musings from Primary Care

by Dr. Alan Nye, President Primary Care Rheumatology Society, Executive Director, Pennine MSK Partnership Ltd.

This is my final month as President of the Primary Care Rheumatology Society and it’s been a very interesting 2 years for me. I apologise that this blog is England-centric, but England is the totality of my NHS experience and I cannot write about areas outside of my experience. I would like to cover, albeit briefly, three areas that over the past few years have become very dear to my heart:

MSK training for primary care
MSK networks and commissioning MSK services
Shared decision-making

For a long time the lack of training for front line GPs has been a real issue for the NHS.…

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Guest Blog: Care planning and musculoskeletal conditions

by Laura Boothman, Policy Manager at Arthritis Research UK

Planning is indispensable in many areas of life – we use it to manage projects, finances and time. Identifying goals, setting actions and discussing and sharing them with others can make us more likely to stick to our plans and achieve the outcomes we want. When it comes to planning to support our health, however, there is room for improvement; according to the latest survey data only 3% of general practice patients currently say they have a written plan.…

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Guest Blog – Back pain and the hidden opportunity of public health

by Dr Adam Al-Kashi, Head of Research & Education, BackCare

In his 1985 paper – Sick Individuals and Sick Populations (1) – epidemiologist, Professor Geoffrey Rose rendered a crucial insight, “The more widespread a particular cause, the less it explains the distribution of cases. The hardest cause to identify is the one that is universally present”. Despite decades of evidence, policy and best intention, a musculoskeletal health crisis has emerged and escalated to the point of now warranting its very own world summit.…

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Guest Blog – Chief Cooks and Bottle Washers?

by Jann Landles, Hon Secretary, Vasculitis UK

In the European Union, a disease is defined as rare when it affects less than 1 in 2000 people. The European Commission defines rare diseases as ‘life-threatening or chronically debilitating diseases which are of such low prevalence that special combined efforts are needed to address them’. With 15 systemic vasculitis disease phenotypes and several subsets, some of these diseases being very rare but not all of them life threating, you can begin to image the issues facing Vasculitis UK.…

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Guest blog – The Ice Bucket Challenge

by Chloe Kastoryano, Project Coordinator, Scleroderma Society

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) – a condition very few of us had heard of until recently – is suddenly widely known throughout the world. The ice bucket craze that started in America has swept across the pond and now in the UK we’re doing the same. The globe has united behind the #icebucketchallenge, and different countries have put their stamp on the stunt with their own variants – Gaza, for example, is doing the #RubbleBucketChallenge. …

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