Assessing has no benefit
More than 1500 people with Parkinson’s across Scotland are facing unnecessary distress and financial uncertainty because of the UK Government’s insistence on reassessing them for a disability benefit, even though their health will not improve.
As well as causing needless anguish, reassessing everyone with Parkinson’s will cost UK taxpayers more than £3million.
These pointless reassessments are being rolled out across Scotland despite the fact that people with Parkinson’s won’t get better.
The support is meant to help people to manage the extra costs of living with a condition, but the reassessments have seen a quarter of people with Parkinson’s losing some, or all, of their award — despite previously being told they’d have their award for life
That’s why Parkinson’s UK is calling on the UK Government to move people with Parkinson’s, who have already been assessed as needing the highest rate of care, to the new benefit without any reassessment.
By 2020, these disability benefits will be controlled by the Scottish Government and we want Holyrood to learn from Westminster’s mistakes. We’ve been promised a compassionate approach to the new Scottish Social Security system.
What better way to put that approach into action than by honouring existing awards for people whose condition will not improve.
More than 2300 people from Scotland have already signed our petition for change and we hope your readers will join us by signing it at www.parkinsons. org.uk/pippetition.
Tanith Muller, Parliamentary and Campaigns Manager, Parkinson’s UK in Scotland. Re assurance on diabetes It was World Diabetes Day on November 14, and for anyone — or their child — who has just been diagnosed, I wanted to let them know that having type 1 diabetes doesn’t mean you should wrap up in cotton wool.
I was diagnosed 20 years ago and throughout my teens I would inject insulin four or five times a day and test my blood glucose with finger pricks another four times a day.
I wake in the night when my blood glucose level needs attention, monitor my glucose levels as many as 13 times a day and weigh nearly everything I eat to work out the carbohydrate content so that I can inject insulin accordingly.
Yet, oddly enough, I consider myself lucky.
You might think that having this condition may seem a burden, but it hasn’t ever held me back.
I’ve held down jobs, travelled the world and due to technological advancements, managing my type 1 diabetes with a flash glucose sensor and an insulin pump — technology only available because of medical research — has enabled me to become a healthy mum of two children.
I believe that a cure is within reach, which I why I work as a fundraiser.
I don’t fundraise for myself, but for children who have been diagnosed. I want them to have a ‘normal’ childhood where they can go to birthday parties and eat cake, or have sleepovers at friends’ houses with midnight feasts, without the fears of high blood glucose levels and the necessity of carb counting.
Constant thinking, adjusting, calculating, measuring, worrying and stress is a part of life for many people with type 1 diabetes, but with a cure, it will be all be gone.