Support group asks for help
Drop-in sessions for ostomates in EK
A plea for financial help has been made to help an ostomate support group continue their work in East Kilbride.
NHS midwife Anna Hulme and former Hairmyres Hospital pharmacist Val McNeil started their Providing Ongoing Ostomate Support Scotland group in January in the town’s library.
The group offers two-hour drop-in sessions to ostomates – people with surgical openings in their body for the discharge of body wastes – where they confide in each other and get/offer advice about their conditions.
The meetings are spearheaded by Val, who suffers from fibromyalgia, and admitted that without ostomate volunteer Anna, she wouldn’t be able to offer the same level of guidance.
Val said: “We realised that there were none to very few stoma support groups in Scotland. In England, there are 50 plus, but in Scotland, there are only a handful.
“A lot of groups died off in Covid, so there was a severe lack of support for ostomates in Scotland, and we are trying to provide that.
“Anna’s experience is invaluable to me.
“I obviously have a different condition where I can relate to them in a different way, but having Anna, who has actually gone through that experience, is vital for the group.”
Anna, from Hamilton, added: “I had a stoma until I was 13-years-old when I got it removed out of embarrassment. I now have it again at the age of 23.
“I have dealt with it my whole life and received very little support.
“I felt very much like an outcast, so when I got it again, I was really driven into starting a group to support others like me who felt the same way.
“That is when I came across Val’s group.
“With me living with one, I can relate to folk that come. There is a stigma around it. It is so taboo, and although it has gotten better, it is not spoken about enough.
“It is more accepted for people to talk about things like heart conditions than it is a stoma. It is not a pretty subject talking about poo. When I was a child, everything was a lot more basic. There are now more products and colours of bags etc to support people with a stoma, so getting that information out there is vital.
“It was lovely to help people like me through my experience.”
Despite having a successful start, the women are worried that without support and funding from local and national government, they won’t be able to continue to help people in South Lanarkshire who have gone through ostomy surgery.
Anna said: “There is around one in 335 people in the UK living with a stoma. That is thousands of people, but you never meet anyone with it.
“The bowels are one of the most complex organs, yet it gets the least amount of funding from the Scottish Government.
“Our main problem is funding at the moment. We are not getting funding from the Scottish Government. This is something that they should be supporting.
“Even South Lanarkshire Council are not willing to support us.
“We want to be able to support people with this condition, but we are not able to due to the lack of funding. We want to spread this across Scotland, but we can’t do that until we get funding.”
South Lanarkshire Council and the Scottish Government were approached for a comment.
I was really driven into starting a group to support others like me