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All-Party Parliamentary Group on SCI

Our campaigns team need your help!  Please write to your MP and tell them about the next meeting of the All-Party Parliamentary Group

This virtual meeting is being held on Wednesday 9 June at 3.30pm and will be chaired by Owen Paterson MP.  The last All-Party Parliamentary Group meeting in March was a resounding success.  It was attended by Helen Whately MP, Minister for Care, and she formally committed that the specialist Spinal Cord Injury Centre beds repurposed to support the NHS response to Covid-19 will return to Spinal Centre use once the pandemic allows.

Despite this success, much more needs to be done.  NHS England have identified a shortfall in capacity of 50 beds in the national network of specialist Spinal Cord Injury Centres. This means that a significant number of people won’t get the vital specialist treatment and rehabilitation they need, and will be treated elsewhere in the NHS, but at significantly greater cost.  To illustrate, whilst a bed in a SCI Centre costs approximately of £600 pounds per day, this is ONE THIRD of the cost of treating an SCI patient at a Major Trauma Centre, where they will typically end up with current restriction on SCI beds.

We need you to email your MP, to ask them to attend the meeting and to demonstrate their support for SCI people and the issues they face – issues made even more pressing by the significant impact of the pandemic.

Emailing your MP is very easy – just follow the three steps below.

  • Go to this link: writetothem.com and enter your postcode.
  • Scroll down to find ‘Your MP’ and click on their name.
  • Copy and paste our suggested template letter into the message box, and edit it to include brief details of any relevant personal experience of SCI.
  • Add your address details, so they know you are in their constituency, and do make sure you double check your email address is right so you can see their reply. Then preview the message to make sure it’s correct, and send!

Thank you very much for your support, we really appreciate it.