When it comes to treatment and quality of life for people living with an MSK condition, it’s far from a level playing field.
Where you live, your income, gender, and ethnic background can all have an impact on MSK health. Sadly, deprivation is a significant driver of inequalities, with people in deprived areas more likely to have a long-term MSK condition. They also tend to experience more chronic pain, worse outcomes, and lower quality of life.
That is why ARMA is conducting the first ever national inquiry into MSK Health inequalities to explore and highlight these issues and make recommendations for improvement.
Local Services
Local services play a key role in addressing these issues. In our first call for evidence, we heard insightful and thought-provoking responses from service providers throughout the length and breadth of the country.
We are now calling on more local service providers to respond and provide examples from their own experience. We are interested in any local attempts to address inequalities in MSK related to deprivation, even if you have not engaged in formal research.
Some of the key questions include:
- Do you have an understanding of the area you serve in relation to deprivation, for example, the data you need?
- Have you been able to assess the underlying causes of inequalities related to deprivation?
- What barriers have you faced in making this assessment?
- What would make it easier to understand inequalities related to deprivation?
- What actions have you taken to address inequalities related to deprivation and why did you choose these?
- What challenges or barriers, if any, did you face?
- Any evaluation of effectiveness of your interventions, or how you plan to evaluate them
Whether it’s a few brief points, anecdotal evidence, or a longer response, we would love to hear from you! We are seeking to hear from as wide a range of experiences and geographic areas as possible. It would also be helpful to understand the nature of each area, for example rural or inner city, and the extent of deprivation within it.
All evidence submitted will be read, analysed and summarised, and then discussed by a lived experience panel. We will also be holding a series of live online evidence sessions, where people will be invited to discuss their evidence in more detail.
The aim is to produce a report drawing conclusions, to be published at the end of this year. We hope as many people and service providers as possible will join us in this important step in tackling inequalities in MSK healthcare.
Local services have until 31 May 2023 to respond. Please do share this with your networks and anyone else that might have an interest.
