I’m raising £684 to enable patients to attend the World Healthcare Congress in March and share their views on the future of healthcare in Manchester with medical professionals, researchers and policy makers which will help them better understand Manchester patients’ needs.  

Who am I?

My name is Sarah and I work at The University of Manchester in the Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Health. I coordinate patient involvement group meetings at the University to help to ensure that they are key partners in all of the research we undertake here.

A little bit about us

I've been working with patient involvement groups at the University for a year now, assisting them with writing and rehearsing their personal patient experience stories for them to present during a 'Ted Talks' style session at the World Healthcare Congress in March 2019. The Congress has come to Europe for the first time in decades and Manchester’s health and social care devolution makes it the perfect host city for this focus on revolutionising healthcare delivery. The University is a key supporting partner of the Congress and this provides an exciting opportunity to ensure that the patients working with us can shape the future of health and social care in Manchester.

I want to raise £684 to help pay for representatives of the University’s patient groups to travel to the Congress to tell their stories and ensure that the University is able to feed patient voices directly into its research. I also want to enable additional patients to attend the Congress as delegates and ensure that they are part of all conversations with senior academics, clinicians and policymakers present.

The Congress has kindly provided us with free registration for patient delegates so we just need to fund their travel. All patient participants are based in the North West but many of them have severe disabilities necessitating the use of taxis, etc.

As one of our patients said at our last meeting, "everyone is a patient". Although I'm not giving a talk myself, I have experienced severe illness, and helping patients' voices be heard by people in a position to act upon what they say is really important to me. I want these peoples’ stories, that they’ve worked so hard to be able to tell, to be shared as widely as possible and to make a real difference to the experiences of patients in the future.

All of us are patients at some point in our lives. You can enable this patient group to attend the World Healthcare Congress 2019 and represent the interests of all patients to clinicians, academics and policy makers. Although registration to the Congress is free for patients, travel can be prohibitively expensive, those for patients who may not currently be working due to ill health. You can remove this barrier and ensure that patient voices are heard. 

Where will the money go?

If we hit our minimum fundraising target then we will spend the money on travel costs for nine patient speakers at the World Healthcare Congress 2019.

Travel costs for nine North West patient speakers:

Estimated at £12 per person per day over three days = £324

If we hit our full target we can also pay for travel for all 30 of the patients being offered free tickets.

Travel costs for 30 patient delegates:

Estimated at £12 per person per day over one day each = £360

If we’re lucky enough to raise more than our full target then we will use this to promote our patient speakers’ stories to a wider audience, to bring their stories to more people so that they can have the widest possible impact.

Rewards

We have some cool rewards to thank anyone who donates, whatever the amount you might give. Check them out down the right hand side.

Find us here

Please follow us on Twitter to find out how we are doing - we will be giving (very regular) updates during our fundraising campaign. Follow: @RD_UoM

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