Helping men self-manage

15/09/14 . News

'How can we best support men to self-manage?' Last week the Department of Health Sciences at the University of York, in partnership with the Men’s Health Forum presented a symposium on self-management support, bringing together experts and self-managing men. 

The Men's Health Forum is supporting pioneering research into men and self-care, conducted by the Department of Health Sciences at the University of York. The Self-Man project has reviewed the published evidence on self-management support interventions, with the aim of creating recommendations and guidance for practitioners, as well as comparing effectiveness, accessibility and acceptability of the various interventions used. 

At this month's conference Men's Health Forum chief executive Martin Tod gave the introductory presentation.

 

 

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.

Registered with the Fundraising Regulator