Author: Garreth

Brace Yourself! PROP-OA knee pain trial

How a research trial will support people living with knee pain and osteoarthritis though advice, exercise and knee braces

Knee pain affects one in four people over 45 years in the UK. The most common cause is osteoarthritis, but many people will suffer without getting the diagnosis.

Osteoarthritis and its symptoms vary a lot and negatively affect people’s daily lives. There is no cure for osteoarthritis, but with treatment, symptoms can be improved and allow people to stay active.

Wearing a knee brace is one of the options that could help by reducing the load going through the joint and improving its stability.…

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Online Pain Toolkit 5-day workshop

Online Pain Toolkit workshop for UK and English-speaking EU residents
Presented by The Pain Toolkit – the home of supported pain self-management.

Many people may not have access to pain management programmes and so the Pain Toolkit has organised a team of experiences coaches to run a 5-day (2.5hrs a day) workshop. The workshop is open to people living with persistent pain, and open to maximum of 10 participants. Pain Toolkit will be running three workshops during 2022 in Canada and Australia.…

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Links added during the WT20 Conference webinar

The following links were added to the chat during the webinar:

Coproduction of healthcare service

NHS Change Challenge

Shared Decision Making for patients on surgical waiting list infographic

Clinical validation of surgical waiting lists: framework and support tools

The Doctor will Zoom you Now

Personalised Care Institute home page

Arthritis Action’s Personalised Member Pathway

National Voices resource on how waiting for care impacts on people

ONS data
For data geeks who want to see the ONS data Natalie mentioned

Public Health Profiles
Public Health England’s fingertips tools on local data on the populations where you live

Patient involvement in rheumatology outpatient service design and delivery

More on the ECHO project:

Project Echo’s “Origin Stories” video.…

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NOA blog: Sustainability in Orthopaedic Surgery

The National Orthopaedic Alliance’s latest guest blog post, Sustainability in Orthopaedic Surgery, comes from Irrum Afzal, Vipin Asopa, Vipul Patel and Deiary Kader of the South West London Elective Orthopaedic Centre:

“Sustainability in surgery continues to gain great traction as global warming and climate change continue to become an ever-growing problem. The NHS is the largest single contributor of greenhouse gas emissions in the public sector and NHS England has an annual carbon footprint of 24.9 million tonnes of CO2e.…

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NOA Annual Members’ Conference a success

The 2021 NOA Annual Members’ Conference held on 20 October was an opportunity for staff representing the National Orthopaedic Alliance’s member organisations, patient representatives and NOA partners from across the country, including ARMA, to share achievements, address shared challenges and discuss what’s in store for orthopaedics in the future.

Read more about the day and view a highlights video here.

Introducing The Cornwall Arthritis Trust

Guest Blog by Professor Tony Woolf, Acting Chair and Secretary, Cornwall Arthritis Trust

Cornwall is well known for its coastline, beaches and mixture of rugged countryside with wooded valleys, great gardens and wonderful vistas. Poldark county. A visitor’s paradise but it has all the problems of rural and coastal communities with an economic dependency on agriculture and tourism and a low pay economy. Economic hardship is not immediately obvious but there are Cornish estates that rank among the highest in the league tables for multiple deprivation, and it is one of only two regions of the UK that was eligible for special assistance from Brussels as a result of having incomes per head less than 75% of the EU average.…

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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.…

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Goodboost recognized in Fit For Life Awards

fit for lifeIn 2021, the Fit for Life Foundation Awards recognized GoodBoost alongside two other organisations that embody an innovative and impactful approach to improving the health and fitness of older people.  

GoodBoost were cited for their creation of personalized exercise tools, and praised for combining their clinical knowledge with technology to create affordable and easy-to-use water-based exercises.

These exercises, associated with Swim England’s Water Wellbeing programme, are to be expanded to more pools across the country after an independent health-economic analysis has shown that each pool delivering Good Boost creates more than £90,000 of health savings through reduced appointments and health procedures.…

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National Voices Timely Access to Care

A new publication from National Voices Timely access to care: Principles for recovery argues for an inclusive, equitable and person-centred recovery, focusing on the whole person, in the context of their lives, and the whole system, and the context within which it is operating. There are three sets of recommendations: one for government and system leaders, one for people planning and delivering services and one for the VCSE.

Access the document here.