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Lottery awards – we won !!

At the BBC Big 7 lottery awards event on Saturday MDS won the award in the health category for our train the trainer programme. It was an exciting evening. The award was accepted by our Chairman Alan Alderman who was able to make a short speech. Our sincere thanks go to all those who voted for us and encouraged their friends to do the same. The Programme can be watched on BBC i player  http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/tv/bbc_one/2008-08-30 Our award comes about 10 minutes into the programme.

Congratulations go to Sarah Day our head of fundraising who secured our lottery grant of £131,000 for the project and to Amanda Reeves who has been implementing the programme of eccentric viewing training for the volunteer trainers and their clients. We are also grateful to Dr Aidan Flynn and his wife Yvonne who were filmed for the awards show with their clients Angela and John Fox from the North Staffs Group and also to Jenny Robinson from Fareham who was filmed for the trailers for the programme. The Society is also most grateful to John Collins and his team at Optima who generously helped to get the train the trainer programme off the ground and have been running excellent courses ever since. Our thanks also go to all our volunteer trainers who are now the mainstay of this groundbreaking initiative.

The last two weeks have been excellent for awareness raising. On 18th August macular degeneration was featured on BBC Panorama which focussed on the NICE post code lottery for new drugs. Last Wednesday TV and radio news bulletins covered the approval of Lucentis throughout the day and finally the Saturday night TV show gave us a useful burst of publicity.
Once more very many thanks to all who have supported us so effectively.

Tom Bremridge
Chief Executive
The Macular Disease Society