Our Future Health Project
WENVOE FORUM
Considering Tomorrow Today
“Our Future Health Project
Nearly 2,000.000 people have already joined, how about you? ”
Last month’s Forum article suggested that we as individuals can, given the right help and information, have a substantial impact on our own health. It also touched on bigger scale actions taken by Government at all levels and one such project is Our Future Health. This is the UK’s biggest health research programme ever. As the name implies it aims to collect information now which will improve health in the future. Through working with a mind blowing 5 million people, nearly 7.5% of the population, drawn from all sorts of background, the programme expects to discover and test more effective ways of detecting, preventing and treating disease. There has been much discussion over a number of years about the focus of the health service and the need to invest resources in such a way as to encourage a healthy, long lived population and not just treat the sick. Our Future Health is part of this change.
Diseases often start in the body long before symptoms are noticed, and by the time individuals present to the NHS, the disease has taken hold and has already done damage. Much of the workload for the NHS is treating people who are very sick and we should be very grateful that the free at the point of delivery NHS that we have is there for us in our time of need. How much better it would be if we didn’t reach that crisis point. Detecting disease at an earlier stage means that treatment can begin sooner and is often much less intrusive and more effective. To explore what to look out for at an earlier stage a collaboration between public, private and charity sectors is actively researching on what can only be described as a huge scale.
Our Future Health will encourage individuals to volunteer a little of their time and possibly a small sample of blood. It will be really important that those participants come from all over the UK and from all sorts of different backgrounds so that they represent different ethnic backgrounds, different economic situations, different geographical areas, those who do and don’t have existing health issues etc etc.
The first step is for individuals to set up an account and they will then be able to complete a health and lifestyle questionnaire. Information is provided about how the project looks after data and at all stages consent is required. At any point an individual can withdraw and the data is held in a way that means the individual cannot be identified. The project will bring all of a participant’s health records together and the individual will be invited to attend a clinic where they will donate a small blood sample and complete some questionnaires and tests. Participants receive £10 in recognition of their help. Some of the blood is tested immediately but some will be retained for testing in the future which will be very useful and may shorten the development time of new diagnostic tests, treatments or vaccines. This huge bank of information will be available to researchers in the UK and beyond.
Nearly 2 million people have already joined and much more information is available at website ourfuturehealth.org.uk. This is something you can do to help improve the future for the whole population.
Our Future Health is a charity and company ltd by guarantee and it is supported by UK Research and Innovation, life sciences companies and disease-related charities.
Community Planning – Don’t forget that on 23rd November you can come to the Community Centre to talk about the future of Wenvoe and how Local Government, Service providers and the community can set out together joint ambitions for the medium and long term. Setting a long term plan is not easy, sometimes a long term issue is easy to turn into a vision but sometimes it is easier to identify what you don’t want for the future of Wenvoe. Either way, call in on 23rd for a chat.
To join our Facebook group, please ‘friend up’ with the Gwen Fo ac-count @ https://www.facebook.com/gwen.fo.1 and then jon the Wenvoe Forum @ https://www.facebook.com/groups/635369267864402
Some further information and updates, blog site https://wenvoeforum.wordpress.com/. Any Wenvoe community member is welcome to join the Forum meetings, via Zoom, which are normally held 19.00 on the second Thursday of each month. E-mail gwen-fo.forum@gmail.com if you wish to join