Mental health and MSK

CEO update by Sue Brown
The launch by National Voices of their Ask Me How I Am report got me thinking about mental health. The report highlights many of the issues that ARMA has raised in relation to MSK. Mental health and MSK are not separate. Living with a long term painful condition which restricts your mobility is clearly going to have a psychological as well as a physical impact. Which is why ARMA has made mental health a priority area for our work in the last few years.…

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PHE’s Every Mind Matters updated

The Better Health – Every Mind Matters  website has recently been refreshed to help people access the content more easily.

There are things we can all do to look after our mental wellbeing and the Every Mind Matters Mind Plan can provide NHS approved personalised advice on positive steps people can take to help manage anxiety, sleep better and boost your mood. Get Your Mind Plan here.

The Better Health Every Mind Matters platform includes practical tips and videos from experts and what you can do to help others – including advice for parents and for children and young people.…

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NOA wellbeing workshops

Using feedback from staff at member organisations, the National Orthopaedic Alliance developed a series of wellbeing workshops which kicked off in May. Upcoming sessions covering Spotting & Preventing Burnout and Resilience – Recharge the Inner Battery are being run for the NOA by Work Well Being.

Find out more about upcoming sessions on the NOA website.

Women and young people hit hardest by lockdown

Study suggests women and young people have been hardest hit psychologically by coronavirus lockdown

A new study, published in The Lancet Psychiatry, has looked at the potential impact of the coronavirus pandemic on population mental health.

  • It found that there was an overall increase in mental distress in people aged 16 years and older in the UK.
  • This did not affect all groups equally, with some subgroups showing marked increases. Factors most strongly linked with mental health deterioration were those associated with pre-existing health inequalities, such as gender and age.


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Mental and physical health: practical ways to improve care

Two new outputs have been published by the Q Lab and Mind on improving care for people living with both mental and physical health problems:

  1. A practical guide to improving care that includes ideas, challenges to prepare for and examples to learn from.
  2. A set of service principles that can be used to inform decisions about improving, designing or commissioning services across mental health and persistent back and neck pain.

The outputs are a result of the 12-month partnership between the Q Improvement Lab (part of Q, delivered by the Health Foundation) and Mind – the mental health charity – on improving care across mental and physical health.…

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10th Annual ARMA Lecture 2019

No Health Without Mental Health: Why mental health is all of our business
by Brendon Stubbs

20 November 2019

Our annual lecture 2019 explored the links between MSK and mental health, the implications for how we commission and design services and how we work with individual patients. Everyone has a role to play because mental health is all of our business. Brendon Stubbs is Head of Physiotherapy, South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation trust and NIHR Clinical Lecturer, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King’s College London.…

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Mental health and persistent back and neck pain project

Designing care for people living with both mental health problems and persistent back and neck pain

by Jenna Collins, Marketing and Communications Manager, Q Labs, The Health Foundation

In September 2018, the Q Improvement Lab (part of the Health Foundation) and Mind embarked on a year-long collaboration to understand how care can be improved across mental health and persistent back and neck pain.

The Q Lab and Mind have recently shared the first insights from this work, drawing on the experiences of over 100 collaborators to give an overview of why this challenge warrants attention and promising opportunities to improve care.…

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Mental health and MSK: why equal health is everyone’s business

Guest blog by Andy Bell, Deputy Chief Executive, Centre for Mental Health

Having a musculoskeletal condition increases your risk of having a mental health problem, and people with a mental health condition are more likely to have a range of MSK problems. Yet the way services for both are organised and the ways professionals in each are trained offers little recognition of the overlaps between them.

Mental health and MSK conditions share some common traits and challenges. Both are complex and diverse.…

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