Arthritis and Musculoskeletal Alliance
Influencing policy and care together for best lifelong musculoskeletal health
The Hypermobility Syndromes Association gets a lot of questions about children struggling with the return to school, and enquiries from teachers looking to support hypermobile students as we approach half term.
HMSA has prepared the School Toolkit for EDS and JHS to address this need.
You can pick up the printed resource for educators in the HMSA shop, or for more information on how to help, browse the online toolkit that the HMSA launched with EDS UK last year:
RA Awareness Week took place on 12-17 September, and the theme this year was to dispel the myths that surround living with Rheumatoid Arthritis, with a brand new #RAFactOrFiction quiz.
NRAS needs your help to spread awareness of the condition, and you can do this by sharing the #RAFactOrFiction quiz with your friends and family, to help people understand more about the condition and the impact it has on people’s lives.
We know that those of you in the RA community are only too aware of the misconceptions that other people can have around inflammatory arthritis, so this quiz has been designed to educate the general public about the condition.…
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During RA Awareness Week, NRAS CEO Clare Jacklin was joined in conversation by actress Sheila Hancock. You can watch now to see Sheila speak about current affairs, her acting career and her life living with Rheumatoid Arthritis.
Pain Concern would like to announce their new podcast episode, Sharing pain – how group consultations can help with long COVID and other conditions.
Episode description: Airing Pain producer, Paul Evans, spoke to doctors and patients at Berkshire Pain Clinic and Woodley Centre Surgery about managing the symptoms of Long COVID, the importance of group consultations and the similarities between Long COVID and other chronic conditions. The episode also explores the multi-disciplinary approach at the clinic, and includes interviews with a range of medical staff on how they help people to manage their symptoms.…
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Last month, Sarah Leyland, osteoporosis specialist nurse and clinical adviser at Royal Osteoporosis Society, presented information on osteoporosis and fractures, and the link between corticosteroid use and having rheumatoid arthritis.
You can watch a recording of the webinar on the NRAS Facebook page here.
NHS England has published a suite of eight decision support tools covering varying conditions along with guidance on how to use them and evaluating the impact.
Four of these relate to MSK conditions:
Decision support tools (DSTs), also called patient decision aids, support shared decision making (SDM) by making treatment, care and support options explicit, providing evidence-based information about the associated benefits and risks, and helping people to consider what matters most to them in relation to the possible outcomes, including doing nothing.…
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At the National Rheumatoid Arthritis Society (NRAS), research helps develop and deliver services to best meet the needs of all those living with inflammatory arthritis. NRAS is planning to develop resources with practical information about managing stress levels. The ‘Stress Matters’ project is an NRAS initiative that aims to develop a better understanding on the topic and develop appropriate resources for people living with inflammatory arthritis (IA).
To kick off the project NRAS has developed a survey to gather your lived experiences of how stress impacts your arthritis as well as your insights into what sort of support, if any, you’ve found or have been offered, that helps.…
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NRAS launched their Wellbeing Courses in May and owing to their success the next set are now being released.
The NRAS Wellbeing Courses starting within the next month are:
The courses consist of either two or five/six weeks in length, meeting once a week online.…
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SMILE-RA is a unique and engaging e-learning experience for people with RA and their families who want to understand more about RA, and its treatments. SMILE-RA has a modular approach to learning, so each module is on a particular theme or subject and takes between 20 mins and half an hour to complete.
There is an intuitive interface that makes it easy to use and navigate your way around. After registering and completing the Foundation module which includes baseline evaluation questions, you can then direct your own learning experience and choose whichever modules are of interest to explore next.…
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By Anna Wilson – EULAR Edgar Stene Prize essay competition, runner-up in the UK national competition
After almost nine years of increasing intensity, the pain throughout my body was becoming unbearable. I vividly remember arriving at my doctor’s appointment that day to receive my blood test results, my fingers tightly clutching a list of symptoms.
“I know it sounds like I’m a hypochondriac,” I began awkwardly, “but I get inflamed eyes, rib cage pain, lower back spasms and stabbing in my hips that is so bad I struggle to walk in the morning.…
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