Arthritis and Musculoskeletal Alliance
Influencing policy and care together for best lifelong musculoskeletal health
Health Education England and the Institute of Osteopathy have published a quick guide to support the understanding of the value that osteopaths can bring to productive NHS services.
The guide, which looks to facilitate the best use of the multi-professional workforce, is aimed at clinical leads, workforce leads, operational managers and any senior leaders who are involved in workforce development.
Moving Medicine Launches Physical Activity Resources on Anxiety, Type 1 Diabetes, Obesity, and MenopauseMoving Medicine have launched four new resources designed to help healthcare professionals have better conversations about physical activity with people suffering from anxiety, people with type 1 diabetes, people who are obese, and people experiencing menopause.
The free online consultation guides cover the main benefits of physical activity, as well as addressing common barriers that healthcare professionals encounter when talking to people about becoming more active and offering support and ideas on how to navigate them.…
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NHS England’s Core20PLUS5 approach is now applied to children and young people.
Core20PLUS5 is an NHS England approach that focuses on the 20% most deprived of the national population plus specific communities which experience inequality. It identifies five clinical areas requiring targeted improvement.
Initially focused on healthcare inequalities amongst the adult population, the approach has now been applied to children and young people.
Whilst not covering musculoskeletal health specifically, everyone working in paediatric MSK services should look at the Core20PLUS5 relevant to their own area to help target their work on inequalities.…
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The Musculoskeletal (MSK) Health Toolkit for employers and further education institutions – how to support adolescents and young adults to a better future has been launched.
There are two main aims of the toolkit:
The toolkit was developed in collaboration with the British Society for Rheumatology and the Society of Occupational Medicine alongside clinical experts, patient representative groups, college and university representatives and adolescents and young people themselves.…
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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:
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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PhysioFirst and the CSP LGBTQIA+ network have 
collaboratively run a project with stakeholders to promote EDB within the recognised Professional Networks (PN) of the CSP. The outcome of this project, which was structured as a series of three facilitated meetings attended by each participating Professional Network, is the first version of an EDB reflective awareness tool.
The aim of this awareness tool is to prompt, guide and support the Leadership Teams of all PNs to open the conversation and to reflect on equity, diversity and belonging within their own network and how they align with the CSP’s EDB Strategy.…
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Final update on the James Lind Alliance Psoriatic Arthritis Priority Setting Partnership
During the last two years the researchers running the James Lind Alliance Priority Setting Partnership have explored unmet needs in psoriatic arthritis, determining what is important for people living with psoriatic arthritis, their families and carers, and the healthcare professionals treating them. The project is now complete.
The results from this project will be used to guide future research. This infographic [opens in PDF] summarizes the project and its findings.…
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The All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Osteoporosis and Bone Health published a report into the long-standing postcode lottery in the NHS for osteoporosis care. The report highlights the scale of under-diagnosis, under-treatment and missed opportunities in the NHS, with a blueprint for change. Implementation of the blueprint in England and Wales could save the NHS around £287m over five years – a return on investment of around 3:1 – according to the Royal Osteoporosis Society (ROS), which has supported the Inquiry.…
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The report, Driving Improvements in Axial SpA Services: Building Foundations through Aspiring to Excellence was produced and published by the National Axial Spondyloarthritis Society (NASS), and launched on 22 October 2021. This is the first detailed account of service improvement projects undertaken by rheumatology teams across the UK as part of the Aspiring to Excellence programme.
Every team on the programme is working on a project that will improve diagnosis, treatment and care for patients with axial SpA.…
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