Laura Finucane, our Clinical Director at Sussex MSK Partnership Central, is also President of The International Federation of Orthopaedic Manipulative Therapists (IFOMPT).

This year the International Federation of Orthopaedic Manipulative Physical Therapists (IFOMPT) – the world conference of musculoskeletal and manual physical therapy, celebrates its 50th year as a global leader in Orthopaedic Manual Physical Therapy (OMPT) excellence. The event welcomes experts from all over the world to its conference in Switzerland to explore:

1. Innovative models of care in musculoskeletal and manual physical therapy
2. Physical therapy futures – emerging areas
3. Expertise in musculoskeletal and manual physical therapy

“Sharing ideas and initiatives among colleagues and experts is crucial for developing excellence and helps pave the way for reducing musculoskeletal disorders globally – and enables people to bring new ideas into their local services.

 

This is my fourth and final year as president, and the 50th anniversary of IFOMPT, and I am excited about the discussion and debates and learning about the initiatives taking place around the world and turning those ideas into practice.” ~ Laura Finucane president of IFOMPT and Clinical Director for Sussex MSK Partnership.

Laura has been involved with IFOMPT for the last 18 years, serving on the executive committee for the last 12 years and president from 2020-2024.

Also attending from Sussex MSK Partnership Central are Andrew Kemp and Stephanie Hemmings.

Andrew is an Advanced Practitioner and Stephanie is a research and Audit Lead, Senior MSK Physiotherapist and Lecturer in Physiotherapy at University of Brighton.

They will be presenting a poster titled “Equity factors in trials of physiotherapy for meniscus tear: A systematic review”​  and Stephanie will also be presenting on our nationally celebrated Community Appointment Days (CADs).

The International Federation of Orthopaedic Manipulative Physical Therapists Incorporated represents groups of Manipulative and Manual Physical Therapists around the world who have completed stringent post-registration/post-graduation specialisation programmes in the field of neuro-musculoskeletal disorders.

Last Monday, colleagues from Sussex MSK Partnership Central supported University Hospital Sussex to see 240 people at their own Community Appointment Day (CAD).

Held at the Sports Centre at University Of Sussex in Falmer, the CAD supported people from Brighton through strengths- based What Matters to You conversations, and tailored advice, guidance, and rehabilitation depending on their individual needs.

Community providers were also on hand to offer additional support and to connect people on a wider basis with their health and wellbeing. Including SCFT Living Well Programme, Freedom Leisure, Aging Well, MIND, Together Co Social Prescribing, Brighton and Hove City Council and Sussex Integrated Care Board.

The feedback from those who attended was hugely positive and it was great to support people in the community.

“It was so wonderful to be listened to. Everyone was so kind. Please thank everyone as I now understand more about my condition and can be proactive in my recovery.” – Feedback from attendee

Look out for further CAD updates over the coming months.

The Brighton and Hove Memory Assessment Service (MAS) supports people before, during and after diagnosis.

At the beginning of 2020 we spoke to Elspeth, one of our service users, about the events that led to her Alzheimer’s diagnosis and she explains in her own words how much joy she now gets from life.

“You see, I’m okay at talking but I can’t do things. I can’t write, I can’t spell anymore.”

“I started to have disasters, in my in my flat, I was just turning on the bath water and leaving it, and I used to flood the floor. I had terrible disasters with my cooking – I nearly burnt the building down – and it was absolutely terrifying. And I thought this isn’t normal loss of memory. This is quite serious loss of memory. So I just sort of realized then that I think I probably might have Alzheimer’s.

“When I said, ‘I’m forgetting things, all sorts of little things’, they would say, ‘don’t be silly, we all do that’. They dismissed it.

Elspeth: Am I right to tell you all this?
Here: Yes, please do!

“Well I said, ‘I’m sorry, but I’m going to the doctors and I’m going to say I’m forgetting everything’.

“And (the doctor) said, ‘would you like to go and have a little test?’ It’s like a little, ‘what does this remind you of, and will you draw something’ – and I didn’t do terribly well. Then she said, ‘we could offer you a scan’ and I said, ‘yes, please give me a scan’ – because I have to know.

“What was my reaction to getting the news? It was almost relief, because there’s a reason for my behavior. I never once had a fit about it and thought ‘Oh, my God’. I thought, well, it is what it is.”

Everything seems so lovely to me now

“I’m really, really happy. It’s one of the nicest times of my life with all the struggle and stuff I’ve had. I’m not a sort of miserable person.

“I’m more aware of nature. I just bought a pound bunch of daffodils and they’ve all opened out in my lounge, and I can’t think of anything more beautiful to see in the morning when you wake up, the simple things.

“I said to Penelope the other day, ‘this must just be like when you’ve taken LSD!’ And she said, ‘My God, I hope you don’t really know what that’s like!’ She nearly collapsed when I said that!

“Everything seems so lovely to me now. Everything is there, but you have to know how to join the club first. Some will just go off and say, ‘no, I don’t want to do that’ or ‘I don’t want to go’. And that’s such a shame if I don’t try it, isn’t it?”

What has made the difference to you?

“Just me appreciating life. Because I’m not going to have it much longer anyway at my age, and I just want to cherish every day.”

As a social enterprise our purpose is to create exceptional care, for everyone. We are incredibly proud of the services we deliver, and sharing our learning is an important part of our culture.

Many businesses talk about growth, for us, we measure that in terms of impact, as well as delivery.

That’s why we were so excited about our New Local webinar this morning, talking about our Community Appointment Day innovations in Sussex.

Today over 270 people were on the call, with the wonderful Natalie Blunt and Laura Finucane talking about how they got the CAD up and running, and what impact it had.

Whilst we are still tracking our data, and learning what works, what I’m left with this morning is the incredible news that across the country, CADs are popping up like mushrooms.

What started as a ‘what if’ conversation in our teams, is becoming an accepted idea – fuelled by a desire to experiment, to try something different, knowing that doing what we’ve always done will not solve the problems we face.

Its not just in MSK, and its not about waiting lists. Creating new ways to deliver truly personalised care is an idea our systems are ready for. Common sense innovation, that anyone can read about and think – how might we do that around here?

As a social enterprise, this is what we are about. Business for good. We’re excited to connect with others who are exploring this idea. We’re happy to share, and importantly we’ll learn from how this idea develops in other places.

Creating exceptional care for everyone is going to take change on a new scale. Strength based, community powered health.

Whether you’re daunted, deliberating or determined to try, we’d love to be connected.

Medical approaches to health commonly diverge around acute and chronic presentations. What I need after an unexpected accident, a short illness or a new concern is very different from when I am living with a condition long term.

In an acute illness, rapid, transactional models of care are effective – even welcome – lives are at stake, care is short term, and expertise largely sits with the trained professional.  

Translating this mode into chronic care is filled with risk. A chronic condition affects our whole lives, from morning to night, throughout the seasons. Any treatment approach cannot be simply prescribed from professional to patient, and compliance monitored. We need to flip the lens – any treatment regime needs to ‘comply’ with our lives – what is important to us and what can be sustainably incorporated into our unique set of circumstances.

This challenge of what makes the right health collaboration is what makes us tick at Here. We are inspired and driven by the right combination of skills that builds health – the collaboration between experts–by–experience and health professionals, that has peak potential in working with long term conditions.  

Now more than ever before, this is where we focus our time.  So what sits at the heart of this approach?  

It breaks into 4 key pillars:

1: What Matters To You

This is at the heart. Conversations, not consultations. We start every contact with every patient focused on knowing what matters most – an honest and safe space to match their personal experience, hopes, aspirations and obstacles, with the knowledge and skills a professional might provide. It sounds simple, and it many ways it is. It takes a commitment to putting your needs as a clinician, an administrator, a busy health professional second place, making sure value to the patient is the offer on the table.

2: True collaboration

Every individual conversation is a collaboration. Shared decisions with people seeking care are made and ways forward devised. Then we learn, we change, the service and our partnerships evolve. The people who use our services become part of our infrastructure – with paid roles bringing deep expertise. 

This isn’t ‘representation’, we invest time and resource in people who have the skills we need – we co-design, improving the services we provide because we have access to a secret weapon – the inside track of what it is like to receive them. We do this, not just because it is the right thing to do, but because it is the smart thing – our services are better – for the people who use them, the people working in them, and the communities they serve. 

3: Our data

We believed our approach would be better. Now, we know that it is with real time data, available to all, that tracks outcomes. It tells us what works, and what our populations need. It lets us manage our resources well, particularly in services under pressure. Our data enable us to create equity by design. All our services generate and report data on who uses them, and who doesn’t, driving us to take action to reach the people who may need us most, and who are least often served well. Smart data system drives real change in the world.

4: Our approach is sustainable

A temporary pilot, that leaves no lasting legacy of change waste opportunity, effort and resource. We know our world is changing, and that’s why we have a continuous approach to innovation and improvement. We have to take the best of the innovations and bake them in to our service design. Complex repetitive tasks are prone to human error, we use the best technology to free precious time for clinicians and care staff to invest in human and unhurried connections.

We share what we find, taking pride when others adopt approaches we have road–tested. Working with partners, we can step in, and out of delivery. We work alongside anchor institutions and community groups who may be taking this work forward long after our role is complete.

If it sounds right, intuitive, that might be because it speaks to what you would want to build a healthy life. Driving these principles through what we do every day, is what keeps us here, working in health, every day.

It inspires us to better things, and it’s the beating heart of exceptional care, for everyone.

In April and May, across two days, 550 people from our physiotherapy routine waiting list came and joined us in their local community at our Community Appointment Days. 

Community Appointment Days (CADs) provide a comprehensive range of MSK services under one roof. Conveniently located in local leisure centres, CADs offer a range of resources tailored to the specific needs of the local population, providing same-day access to services including assessments, advice, health promotion, rehabilitation and community and voluntary sector support, all in a non-medicalised environment.    

Taking the opportunity to step out of business as usual to look at how we might shape the future MSK service, we knew that the premise for doing so was multifactorial. We recognised that the current system tended to lean into treating people with a single condition, putting people on a pathway that focussed on a biomedical model, and where it was perceived people are best managed in a hospital setting. We also acknowledged that clinicians were being faced with increasing complexity and intensity of clinical practice, and consequently, staff were feeling burnt out with low morale.  

MSK practitioners at a Community Appointment Day (CAD)

Inspired by New Local’s Community Powered NHS and Victor Montori’s ‘Why We Revolt’, the CAD innovation leans into the strength of the community to find the solution to support individuals, shifting away from a paternalistic mindset to a therapeutic alliance which recognises the expertise individuals bring is equal to the expertise that clinicians bring.

Find out what people had to say after attending a Community Appointment Day here.

Download the Community Appointment Day Essential Ingredients.

Download the Community Appointment Day Information Sheet.

About Sussex MSK Partnership Central

Sussex MSK Partnership Central is a joint venture between Here, & Sussex Community NHS Foundation Trust. This is a prime contracting model supporting musculoskeletal (MSK) health for a population of 650,000 covering physiotherapy, orthopaedics, rheumatology and chronic pain. The service operates across central Sussex; including Brighton & Hove, Horsham and mid Sussex and Crawley.

Website: www.sussexmskpartnershipcentral.co.uk

Interested in finding out more about the Community Appointment Days?

Email collab@hereweare.org.uk or use the form below.