BHPR e-News March 2009

Medicine and Me: Arthritis

Arthritis Care and the Royal Society of Medicine are hosting a conference in London on 21 April 2009 from 12.30 p.m. to 5.30 p.m. for clinicians, allied health professionals and people with arthritis to explore issues and share ideas. Please do let your patients know about the conference and we hope you will also be able to join us.

The ‘Medicine and Me: Arthritis’ programme includes four paired presentations from people with arthritis, alongside responses from leading health professionals.

The conference attracts 3 CPD credits. The conference is free to people with arthritis but we ask for a £15 refundable deposit (refreshments and materials included).
Click here for more details
Book online at www.rsm.ac.uk/diary or contact Cristina Dietmann on 020 7290 3919.

arc Reports on the Rheumatic Diseases and ‘Synovium’ newsletter

As the BHPR newsletter is now circulated in electronic form, if you would like to continue to receive printed copies of arc's medical professional publications Hands On, Topical Reviews and Synovium please contact Frances Mawer at f.mawer@arc.org.uk with your full postal address. You will be added to our special mailing list and receive all three publications free of charge as soon as they are available (normally issued three times a year).

Alternatively you can access the latest issues on-line via the ‘Publications for Medical Professionals’ page of the arc website.

Scheduled for publication at the end of March 2009 are:

Hands On (Series 6) No 2. Lung disease in people with arthritis (CJ Warburton)
Topical Reviews (Series 6) No 2. Musculoskeletal aspects of sarcoidosis (B Bourke)
Synovium 26

PANDORA

For members of the RCN Rheumatology Forum there is now access to a programme called PANDORA – a revolutionary database that collects your activity and analyses it. The rheumatology forum has negotiated access to the use of PANDORA and is looking for 200 rheumatology nurses to use it over the next year.

Sometimes, working as a specialist nurse, it is difficult to articulate and quantify what we actually do in terms of activity and quality, as well as the emotional component. All too often managers don't understand what we do and in some cases, when things are tight on the wards, have been asking us to leave our day-to-day work to help out. This has made many of us feel undervalued and misunderstood. Nurse specialists are seen by the management as an expensive resource and increasingly we need to be able to defend our roles. Now there is a way of doing this. Instead of feeling threatened, be proactive and do something about it.

This programme will illustrate to all the diversity of our roles. The data you put in is your data and you will have access to it. All you will need to do is input the data for three days a month – it takes around 20 minutes to put in the data for one day.

The programme logs individual actions rather than consultations; this is in order to capture the complexity of some of our work. Click here to access PANDORA

Scottish Society of Rheumatology: Nursing & AHP update

SSR continues to organise a Spring and Autumn meeting with a medical and Nursing / AHP programme at each of these.

The next Spring meeting is on 27^th March. It is an especially exciting meeting since it is the first to be organised and hosted by an AHP. Professor Jim Woodburn is hosting the event at Glasgow Caledonian University with a varied programme and, as always, lots of networking opportunities!

Within the Nursing and AHP group of SSR we have in recent years collated a Scottish database of those currently working in Rheumatology. This is shortly to be updated and it is hoped that this will continue to be a useful resource in terms of identifying our numbers in practice and aiding communication.

We are fortunate also to have some established networks .This provides us with other CPD opportunities in Rheumatology. Future events includes a Wyeth hosted event on 28^th May in Perth for Nursing and AHPs, as well as an OT Specialist Section study day on 23^rd November also in Perth.

Finally we look forward to catching up with colleagues from around the UK at the BSR/BHPR in Glasgow in April and giving them a hail and hearty Scottish welcome!