Annual Report 2019

A year of consolidation.

2018/19 was a year of stabilisation and a return to growth after the challenges of 2017/18. Throughout the difficult funding environment of the last few years, we have attempted to keep a tight focus on the activities that will make the biggest difference for men and ensure that we continue to deliver against our strategic priorities.

Key achievements over the year included:

  • The successful launch of the 4th edition of our award-winning Man Manual
  • Reaching more men via our website: more than 1.5 million visitors came to us for men’s health information
  • Good progress in our work on diabetes – reflected in our plans for Men’s Health Week and in a new ‘Diabetes for Men’ Manual
  • Progress on health policy – with NHS England including paternal mental health in their Long Term Plan and the Women and Equalities Committee launching an enquiry into the mental health of men and boys
  • A promising pilot of Men’s Pie Club, an initiative to tackle male isolation, in partnership with Food Nation, supported by the Movember Foundation.
Raising the importance of men's health

Three significant opportunities presented themselves in 2018/19 for us to put forward men’s health as a priority.

Topics covered included:

  • In September 2018, Europe’s first ever men’s health strategy was agreed by the 53 member states of WHO Europe at their Regional Committee meeting in Rome on 19 September. We were involved at the consultation stage of the project and strongly support the strategy – and have since been using it to strengthen our call for a men’s health policy (or strategy) in England, Wales and Scotland – including FOI requests to all three Governments asking what response they intended to make to it.
  • In September 2018, NHS England also consulted on its Long Term Plan. We actively participated in consultation events and submitted a detailed response which included a request for explicit reference to paternal involvement in the ‘early years’ part of the strategy, as well as a greater targeting and tailoring to address the issues of men and boys on topics such as cardiovascular disease (CVD) and mental health. 
For the first time, the plan does include explicit reference to perinatal paternal mental health.  Following the plan publication, we were also invited to join the National CVD Prevention System Leadership Forum. This means that we are able to ensure that men’s needs are reflected in this area as well.
  • In November 2018, the Women and Equalities Committee of the House of Commons launched an enquiry into the mental health of men and boys. We were particularly pleased that they explicitly referenced our research in the enquiry’s terms of reference. We submitted a comprehensive response in March 2019 and are preparing in case we are invited to a future oral evidence session.

We took the opportunity of Men’s Health Week coinciding with Diabetes Week in 2018 to raise the issue of men and diabetes. Men are more likely to get diabetes, more likely to suffer complications, more likely to face amputation as a result of diabetes and more likely to die from diabetes. Our goal was to raise awareness of the issue, not just with men, but also with health professionals. 

2018 was also the year when, following a long campaign, the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) announced that the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine should be given to boys across the UK – and we were delighted that the English, Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish Governments all agreed to implement it. We were early supporters of the HPV Action campaign, which was led by our former Chief Executive, Peter Baker – and we fully support their call for a catch-up programme for older boys who have not yet received the vaccine. 

We continue to actively participate in the Department of Health & Social Care Voluntary, Community and Social Enterprise (VCSE) Health & Wellbeing Alliance – leading to meetings with and presentations to Public Health England, NHS England and the Department of Health and Social Care on men’s health inequalities in areas such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, smoking, bowel cancer, mental health and the inequalities between different groups of men..

Leading provision of dedicated health information for men

We made encouraging progress in the number of men that we reach with our health information in 2018/19 – with more than 1.5 million visitors to our website, a 9% increase over the year, and a 50% increase in the number of men reached with our manuals to just under 50,000.

This was partly driven by the successful introduction of two new Man Manuals – Diabetes for Men – launched to support Men’s Health Week 2018 – and the 4th edition of our Man Manual..

One reason that our manuals have reached and helped so many men over the years is our partnership with Haynes Publishing and one sadness this year was the death of John Haynes at the age of 80. The publishing giant, and founder of the iconic Haynes manuals, had been a friend of the Forum since its very inception.

The first Man Manual, a hardback book in much the same format as the brand’s legendary motor handbooks, was published in 2002. Written by the Forum’s then president Dr Ian Banks, it was an instant best-seller and gave rise to the series of paperback manuals that the Forum continues to produce with Haynes support. Those manuals have sold over a million copies down the years.
It’s fair to say the Forum probably wouldn’t be here without John Haynes: we owe him a large debt of thanks.

Focus on men and boys from the most disadvantaged areas, groups and communities

The life expectancy gap between the richest and poorest men is far greater than the life expectancy gap between men and women – and greater than the life expectancy between the richest and poorest women. Men are overrepresented amongst some of the groups with the worst health – including people in the criminal justice system and rough sleepers.  And we are evolving our strategy to reflect that: we will be focusing on male health inequality as part of our Men’s Health Week ‘Men’s Health by Numbers’ campaign in 2019.

Our biggest initiative in this area in 2018/19 was the Men’s Pie Club pilot programme to tackle the needs of isolated men in the more deprived areas of Newcastle, launched in March 2018.  We are working in partnership with Food Nation, a local social enterprise, and the project is funded by the Movember Foundation. Initial results are encouraging.

We’ve also sought to work more closely with the UK Men’s Sheds Association – providing a regular health column for their newsletter, and working with them to ensure that the needs of individual sheds and other small men’s health charities are met by the NHS England Social Prescribing programme.

Strengthening our network

We continue to grow our network.  On Twitter, we now have more than 11,000 followers, and more than 5,200 people are signed up to receive our email news. Our men’s health group on HealthUnlocked now has more than 15,000 members. 

We continue to tailor our communication with different newsletters for professionals, for men and for voluntary sector organisations that are working to help men.

As highlighted last year, the result of a survey of our voluntary sector followers and subscribers showed that only a minority of these partners are men-only health-only charities.  A far wider range of our voluntary sector partners are working on men’s health and wellbeing as a subset of other activities – and we’ve sought to reflect this in our communication and engagement.

We are also active supporters of the global men’s health movement as members of Global Action on Men’s Health – which is providing an excellent forum to engage and share best practice with other men’s health non-Governmental organisations (NGOs) around the world on men’s health issues.

Addressing our funding challenges

After a challenging year in 2017/18, in 2018/19 we stabilised our income and started to grow it again.

Contributors to this included:

  • Increased grant income – both directly and via partnership working with other charities
  • Increased manual sales
  • Increases in some types of fundraising revenue – especially regular giving, sponsorship raised by members of the public, corporate fundraising during Men’s Health Week and a legacy.

In the coming year, we will be:

  • Launching new materials for employers – such as a replacement to our previously successful Challenges and Choices manual and a new ‘straight to men’ training offer for employers.
  • Making more bids to grant-giving organisations and trusts focused on disadvantaged areas, groups and communities – to support work to tackle the particularly poor health outcomes amongst those men who are their beneficiaries
  • Better leveraging our web traffic and email lists to drive digital fundraising – especially regular giving
  • Looking to further cut cost, especially on accommodation.
Looking to the future

While we are the first to recognise the huge improvements in men’s health over the years, recently improvements in life expectancy have stalled and there are still major challenges outstanding:

  • On average, one in five UK men is still dying before the age of 65, and two in five before the age of 75 – with huge and growing inequalities between men in the richest and poorest areas of the country.
  • Men are still more likely than women to die of circulatory disease, liver disease, cancer, diabetes and suicide. 
  • Three in four suicides are by men – suicide is the biggest cause of death for men under 45.
  • When it comes to lifestyle, men are more likely than women to:
    • smoke – with the gap between men and women now growing again
    • drink alcohol at hazardous levels
    • eat an unhealthy diet.
  • Health services are still not effectively engaging with men – particularly men of working age.  Men are less likely to:
    • attend a general practitioner
    • sign up for online NHS services
    • attend an NHS Health Check
    • seek help for mental health problems
    • attend weight management programmes
    • opt for bowel cancer screening
    • visit a pharmacy
    • take a Chlamydia test
    • have a dental check-up
      and these gaps are often worse in the areas of greatest need.

There is plenty to do – and we look forward to working with our supporters and partners to help make it happen in 2019/20.

The Men’s Health Forum need your support

It’s tough for men to ask for help but if you don’t ask when you need it, things generally only get worse. So we’re asking.

In the UK, one man in five dies before the age of 65. If we had health policies and services that better reflected the needs of the whole population, it might not be like that. But it is. Policies and services and indeed men have been like this for a long time and they don’t change overnight just because we want them to.

It’s true that the UK’s men don’t have it bad compared to some other groups. We’re not asking you to ‘feel sorry’ for men or put them first. We’re talking here about something more complicated, something that falls outside the traditional charity fund-raising model of ‘doing something for those less fortunate than ourselves’. That model raises money but it seldom changes much. We’re talking about changing the way we look at the world. There is nothing inevitable about premature male death. Services accessible to all, a population better informed. These would benefit everyone - rich and poor, young and old, male and female - and that’s what we’re campaigning for.

We’re not asking you to look at images of pity, we’re just asking you to look around at the society you live in, at the men you know and at the families with sons, fathers and grandads missing.

Here’s our fund-raising page - please chip in if you can.

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