We invite you to join Pain UK, an umbrella charity for charities helping people with painful conditions:
Pain UK’s Vision
A world where everyone enjoys living the best possible quality of life, free from the devastating effects of chronic pain.
Mission
- To manage and reduce pain
- To ensure that those living in pain know where to find the best support
- To work together as a group of charities, identifying need and to ensure that pain is recognised as an issue in its own right
- To give a voice to people in pain
Aims and Objectives
- To provide a comprehensive information resource for those living in pain as Pain UK or in partnership with other pain charities
- To work together with and improve the efficiency and effectiveness of UK pain charities, helping them to improve quality of life for people in pain.
- To ensure that the voice of people living in pain is heard.
Why join an umbrella group?
CURRENTLY membership is free. You remain a member of Pain UK until you resign or the trustees remove you.
- Raise awareness of your charity. As a member of Pain UK your name will be ‘out there’ more often. We have a section on the website for each charity to describe themselves and to have a link to their website so that members of the public can be re directed to where they can get help and support. Traffic from the Pain UK website to our individual member charities is high and links to websites from good websites will raise your Google profile.
- Member charities are invited to send us their newsletter and highlight any stories which they would like us to consider circulating to all charity members and/or the individual members. The large number of individuals (currently 1,280) who are signed up for ‘news’ is especially valuable when member charities are doing research and seek individuals to volunteer to take part in their projects.
- Pain UK is in contact with the big players that individual charity execs may not have time/ability to cultivate. This means Pain UK has more power to influence policy – louder voice together – move pain up the political and public agenda through Pain UK’s contact with medics, DH and parliament – some of these are British Pain Society, the Royal College of General Practitioners and the Royal College of Nursing. This voice is louder, the more charities it represents!
- Be advised/warned of any service changes. Through our wider membership we will hear of changes and spread the word – then we can collectively get all our members to help bring to bear. This needs all the groups to be interested in sharing information with the others… The more actively groups participate in this aspect, the more effective Pain UK can be.
- Improve the efficiency of your charity. We pass on to your member charities: training opportunities, either free of low-cost on such topics as PR, social media, etc.; media requests (e.g. are you signed up to AskCharity?) This will improve the quality of the support that you can offer your members.
- Pain UK runs free educational and training events for the member charities to help them develop into larger and sustainable charities for the future.
- Pain UK plans to have meetings for charity members to network, spark ideas off each other…
Why we want our Voices heard:
- We want to ensure that at every consultation patients and carers will be asked, “Does it hurt?”
- We to get pain accepted more widely in society. At its General Assembly in Montevideo in 2011, the World Medical Association (WMA) adopted a resolution urging for an end to unnecessary pain for millions of people. The resolution states: “People facing pain have a right to appropriate pain management, including effective medications such as morphine. Denial of pain treatment violates the right to health and might be medically unethical.”
- We want employers to understand the needs of people living with chronic pain.
- We want society to recognize the economic and societal costs of pain if left under-treated.
Our inaugural meeting was held on 1st November 2011, and we now have many member charities of all shapes and sizes. You can see them on the charity members’ page here on our website.
You can contact us on info@pain-uk.org
We welcome new members/organisations who share our mission to join us.