Multiple Sclerosis Trust

Establishing and training new MS nurses is one of the most important focuses of the MS Trust. But first, we need to know where they are most needed.

Over the last year the MS Trust team have been completing a comprehensive mapping exercise of all the MS specialist nurses in the UK.

You might think this was information held by the NHS, but in fact there is no central resource!

In addition to displaying where each MS nurse is placed in the country, the survey reveals the number of patients allocated to each nursing team. This vital info will help us plan our next steps and strategically target our efforts to build provision in areas most at need - like North West Wales, where one MS nurse was tasked with providing care for OVER 1,000 patients! Thanks to the generosity of our supporters we have since appointed a new MS nurse to help in the area, which has greatly improved provision.

The report overview will be published on our www.mstrust.org.uk shortly. Please get in touch if you would like to support our work to improve provision for people with MS in areas where help is needed most. We can't do it alone.

The last 18 months have been the most difficult the MS Trust has faced – as for many companies. Covid-19 has had terrible repercussions for many people with multiple sclerosis. The widespread cancellation of support services across the country has left thousands of people with nowhere to turn for help with their debilitating, life-long condition.

This Christmas, we are running a Big Give Challenge, to enable us to establish Advanced MS Champions and MS Specialist Nurses in areas where they are most needed and run our enquiry service, providing much-needed support for people with MS across the UK.

The challenge relies on organisations pledging support, which is matched by funds raised by our supporters and the Big Give themselves.

We invite you to be one of our Star Pledgers to SEE YOUR DONATION MORE THAN DOUBLED and make a big impact for people with MS.

How it works:

• Make a Pledge by 27^th August.

• We will use Pledges to incentivise our supporters to make a matched donation

• Pay your Pledge after the campaign finishes in December.

Pledge levels:

• £250 An invitation to an exclusive virtual thank you celebration & a signed certificate

• £500 All of the above + your logo on our MS Trust Big Give webpage

• £1,000 All of the above + a personal thank you to your organisation in our digital newsletter

Please join us to double your donation! For more info please contact us or go ahead and make your pledge here:

https://www.thebiggive.org.uk/s/pledge?campaignId=a056900001wZJjoAAG

Anthony Chapman is an educator and producer, and member of bands Collapsed Lung and Arndales. He was diagnosed with MS a few years ago. He has recently started streaming his beatmaking live on Twitch, and was kind enough to create a theme tune for our new podcast series.

During lockdown in 2020 a lot of people started to take part in various online activities. There was shenanigans like getting your parents to make dance videos on TikTok, endless online quizzes, yoga classes and of course lots of gaming. One platform that saw a lot of new activity was Twitch. Ant had had a Twitch account for several years but hadn’t really used it much, apart from watching Scottish comedian Limmy, who was an early adopter of streaming his stand up gigs on the platform. Ant is a musician, educator and musical producer. Although his teaching and producing could still happen during lockdown, live gigs had to stop. Ant plays in his bands Collapsed Lung and Arndales, but trying to organise all band members to get set up online was too difficult.

After watching more and more non gamers using Twitch for different things, Ant decided to have a go at setting up a stream of him making some music. Ant had found that working on other people’s songs, such as remastering and producing was ok, but in the last few years he hadn’t made much music for himself. So he thought that perhaps if he streamed what he was doing people might watch him, "I’ll get the extra push I need". And it worked! After a few months of streaming Ant had made more music than in the previous 10 years. Plus he had created a nice online community of people who showed up every week to watch him make his music. The group of people interacting with Ant via the chat were having lots of fun and learning a lot about how to make beats.

This is why we approached Ant to see if he would be willing to make our new podcast theme song. In MS Awareness week we are launching a new series of podcasts called “Me MySelf and I” concentrating on the lives of people affected by MS during a year of lockdown. Ant himself is one of our stories, talking about his diagnosis story and how having MS has impacted on his life in music. When we asked Ant to take part and get involved, he was game so to say!

“I think the MS trust is a brilliant source of information, if I want to try and find something out about something related to MS, the MS Trust website is always my first port of call.”

You can hear our new fantastic podcast theme tune on all future podcasts of 'MS: Breaking it down' at https://mstrust.org.uk/ms-podcasts.