'Happy Birthday'

to North Cumbria CFS/ME Team

The CFS/ME service in North Cumbria recently celebrated its 2nd birthday, and we thought it would be a good opportunity to update you on the recent advances made within the service. We aim to provide a service that is adaptable, accessible and above all evidence based, and we hope you will agree that we are well on the way to doing that.

The service now benefits from the extensive knowledge and experience of Dr Gavin Spickett, CFS/ME clinical champion for the North/North East of England. Dr Spickett provides monthly diagnostic clinics at Keswick, and provides first class medical input into the team.

The service now has as its base at Keswick Community Hospital. This provides us with a location that sits right in the heart of North Cumbria, with clinic rooms that are accessible to all and valuable office space. We are also now able to access ground floor space to store our extensive Resource Library, and before long we hope to make this accessible to all. We will, however, continue to run fortnightly clinics at Penrith and Carlisle, monthly clinics at Wigton, and clinics at Whitehaven on an ad-hoc basis.

We are now able to offer an eight week fatigue management programme, based at Keswick Community Hospital. We have recently completed the first of these, which proved to be a great success. We do, of course, continue to offer individual interventions, based around lifestyle management, graded activity, rest , relaxation and cognitive behavioural therapy.

To help share our achievements, we are planning to hold an open day at Keswick Community Hospital on Friday 22nd February 2008 from 11 am to 4 pm. However, should you need to contact us in the meantime, please do not hesitate to call on the above number.

Yours Truly, Stephen Atkinson, Heather Garry and Sue Watkinson