Farmers voices key to arthritis study, says University of Worcester
The university is currently carrying out a study on arthritis and collecting first-hand experiences from farmers on how the condition has an impact on their day-to-day lives
Researchers running a University of Worcester study into how arthritis affects farmers have said it's important people share their experiences so they can build a clearer picture on the issue.
It was announced last year the university would be leading the project which it has labelled as "groundbreaking".
Through the work, it is aiming to gather and present how sufferers are currently managing their symptoms, and use that information to inform support and preventative measures to help them with it.
One of the research leads, Dr Victoria Jones, said they are currently in the stage of speaking to those that are formally diagnosed or self-diagnosed and how it directly impacts their day-to-day lives.
She's pushing for more people across Herefordshire and Worcestershire to come forward and talk to help shape the research, including family members of farmers who have it.
"We want to build a set of case studies around farming with arthritis to firstly create a report that can then be used by farmers and farming organisations who can then say to policy makers and politicians, look at what it's really like farming with arthritis, look at the conditions that we're working within," she said.
"There's no document like that, it doesn't exist at the moment, and the second thing we want to do is to produce some advisory material about living well with arthritis and some material around prevention, specifically aimed at young farmers.
"Again, stuff like that does sort of exist, but doesn't quite exist in the way that farmers use, so how our advisory material is going to be, we don't know at this stage, we need farmers to tell us how they need the information to be.
"We don't want to produce stuff that people just put away in a drawer, we want to produce stuff that is genuinely useful guidance in a format that people will use."
She added that while people need to be based in either county they would also talk to others from elsewhere in it as well and highlighted they needed to be over 18-years-old to be involved.