This year, the Neurology Academy celebrate 16 years since it first launched the Parkinson’s MasterClass.
Beginning as a conversation amongst clinical colleagues, the four founders Dr Peter Fletcher, Doug MacMahon, Sue Thomas and David Stewart, were concerned about a lack of knowledge about Parkinson’s.
Intending to run just two programmes of training and mentoring ‘for clinicians, by clinicians’, the MasterClass has now supported over 1,500 healthcare professionals to develop Parkinson’s specialisms, and is routinely booked up over a year in advance. The Foundation level course has doubled its capacity, increasing to give much needed spaces to the junior registrars who now need to include Parkinson’s training in their rotation.
‘It feels like there’s a dearth of doctors specialising as geriatricians at the moment – we want to inspire the registrars we see, and encourage them in pursuing Parkinson’s care,’ says Sarah Gillett, our Managing Director.
With the rise in an aging population, geriatrics is a growing demand, and Parkinson’s patients regularly fall in the ‘older people’ bracket; the British Geriatrics Society note that the condition is one of the most common neurological conditions to affect older people. Members of our faculty are often saying how rewarding they find caring for people with Parkinson’s, and many began teaching to encourage other young doctors to think about going into geriatrics.
The Parkinson’s Masterclass is now one element of the Neurology Academy, which supports a broad range of professionals across a wider array of topics – all with an ongoing drive to enable existing clinical specialists to share their knowledge and enthusiasm with their peers, encouraging confidence and improved practice across the UK.
To celebrate the past 16 years, the Neurology Academy is featuring a Star Showcase, sharing the stories of some of its once-students, now faculty members to inspire and encourage other professionals in their own journeys.
For more information, please contact Sarah Gillett, Managing Director Neurology Academy, at sarahgillett@neurologyacademy.org or call her on (T) 01143 27 02 30 or (M) 07771 54 56 20
The full story is running on the Neurology Academy website and uses the Twitter hashtag #PdMC16
