Founded: 1992
Membership: we are not a membership organisation but act as an umbrella body for the various UK organisations concerned with incontinence.
Funding: Start-up funding from the Government comes to an end this year and will be difficult to replace. A number of companies ("Gold Medal Sponsors") already provide substantial gifts each year. Our budget in 1996/97 was about £180,000. We have this year employed a fundraising and publicity officer for the first time.
Activities: Our general aim is to address three audiences: the public, health professionals and politicians. For the public, we produce leaflets and run a telephone Helpline which provides information and advice to almost 10,000 people a year. For professionals, we produce publications and run occasional study days. Politically, we urge Parliament and the Government to give higher priority to continence services and take up specific issues.
In 1996 we held two successful study days, one on Your Baby, Your Bladder and Your Bowels in March, the other in October on Purchasing Continence Services. This was aimed at the health authorities and GPs who are now responsible for specifying and purchasing the services they wish to offer the public. Five thousand copies of our 1995 report Commissioning Comprehensive Continence Services were circulated throughout the NHS by the Department of Health, and we ourselves circulated copies of a booklet on the subject to all 2001 GP fundholding practices.
Our Continence Products Directory was published, listing all the products on the UK market, and in April 1997 its much enlarged second edition appeared. Two interim update supplements are produced each year. The Directory forms the basis for the PromoCon project, sponsored by ourselves and the Disabled Living Centres Council, which has set up a permanent exhibition of all these products and is working with manufacturers, professionals and users to improve standards.
We have taken up issues such as the level of community continence services, taxation of continence products and the reluctance of the Department of Health to allow new products to be prescribed with Government Ministers and with MPs.
Our major activity has been the "National Pelvic Floorathon" campaign for the 1997 National Continence Day. We chaired the planning group which met through the year and brought together representatives of the Department of Health, other voluntary organisations and two commercial companies and their PR agencies. Despite all their contributions, the workload dominated our office for about three months!
The theme of pelvic floor exercises as a preventive and curative measure for incontinence was chosen as conducive to media coverage. The idea was that keep fit classes including pelvic floor exercises should be held simultaneously all round the country to promote the inclusion of such exercises as a regular part of a normal fitness regime The campaign was backed by the main UK keep fit organisations and by about 40 other women's and health organisations.
In the event there were about 170 local events around the country, including one on the promenade at a seaside resort! 160,000 copies of the Floorathon leaflet were distributed, explaining the need for pelvic floor exercises and how to do them.
Disappointingly there was almost no coverage in the national daily press, despite the involvement of Olympic-swimmer-turned-TV-personality Sharron Davies at our press conference. But we won excellent coverage in many mainstream monthly and weekly magazines, in nearly 100 local newspapers and on many local radio stations.
David Pollock