We played a key role in collecting and representing the views of patients to inform the Chief Medical Officer's Working Group in England and the Scottish Executive's Group. It was these groups that published reports officially recognising M.E. as a real illness. Action for M.E. published a version of this report for children and young people.
We have worked with different types of professionals to help change attitudes and understanding towards M.E. We produced a quick reference guide to help GPs diagnose and manage the illness and distributed it to thousands of doctors across the UK. In January 2002 we jointly wrote an influential editorial for the medical journal The Lancet.
Since 1987 we have been lobbying government for increased funding of M.E. In 2002 the Department of Health funded our work to map M.E. services. The results highlighted patchy and inconsistent provision for patients and we have taken every opportunity to hit this message home. More recently £8.5 million has been pledged by the government for NHS services for people with M.E.
The Medical Research Council (MRC) have produced a plan for M.E. research. Action for M.E. collected the views of our members to feed directly into the plan and we were commended by the MRC for this work.
We are proud of the contribution we have made to improve the lives of people with M.E. but we are also conscious of how much remains to be done.
M.E. continues to affect the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and for many it will be years before the impact of these changes are felt.
