Influencing care

We’ll be a bold, campaigning charity that makes the strongest case for reform in the NHS, social care system and other public services.

The challenge

Tackling osteoporosis is the key to making sure our ageing society can live well. Without action, a longer life won’t be a better life. Without change, our public services face an impossible level of demand. But so far, the silent condition has punched way below its weight in public policy and the NHS.

ROS has long championed the blueprint for timely diagnosis and care: Fracture Liaison Services (FLS), which catch people after the first broken bone and get people onto treatment. But health inequalities run deep across the four nations, with a postcode lottery for quality care. We need to influence change so everyone over 50 can access FLS. Then we need to foster services which can intervene to prevent the first break too. Our Healthcare Professional (HCP) networks have the insight and experience to shape the change needed. We need to get their voices heard at all levels in the NHS.

The evidence

• 2.6m people have undiagnosed broken bones in the spine – these are alarm bells for a broken hip in future, injuries which cost the NHS £2bn per year, but around 70% of broken bones in the spine never come to medical attention.

• Almost a third of people (29%) had to prompt their own health assessment.

• Less than a third of people (32%) are satisfied with the level of monitoring and review they’re getting.

• Only one in ten (13%) thinks the NHS gives osteoporosis the attention it deserves.

The change we'll make

Early in the life of this strategy, we’ll launch the most ambitious public outreach effort in our history. An early warning can help get people into the health system sooner, so we can tackle under-diagnosis and spare them the pain of preventable breaks.

As a small organisation, we need to be targeted if we want to cut through. Therefore the target group for our prevention work will be women and men aged 45-54. This coincides with the age when people are invited for five-yearly health checks, and also the period leading up to perimenopause in women when the risk of osteoporosis spikes.

To keep our efforts focused we won’t engage younger groups during this strategy, but when we’re successful we’ll scale the campaign up in future.

Put osteoporosis and bone health at the top of the public health agenda and keep it there

We’ll be a bold, campaigning charity that makes the strongest case for reform in the NHS, social care system and other public services. We want to galvanise our members, volunteers and supporters into a movement for change.

We’ll make the case for osteoporosis care and treatment to be a top priority for all four UK health systems, with national plans and investment in place across each. And we’ll fight hard to make sure that everyone can get the timely diagnosis, treatment and care they need, wherever they live.

Devolution has fostered game-changing health innovations, from the smoking ban to the organ donation opt-out. That’s why we’ll make sure we’re as influential in the Senedd, Holyrood and Stormont as we are in Whitehall.

There are more platforms for us to shape public policy than ever before: the Long Term Plan’s focus on ageing well and prevention, Best MSK Health, Integrated Care Systems (ICS), the One Wales Plan, the Women’s Health Strategies in England and Scotland, and unprecedented interest in the menopause. We’ll put osteoporosis at the heart of all these reforms.

Shape and drive up NHS standards and improve care

Getting the right treatment can depend on where you live and how well-informed healthcare professionals are about the best ways of treating osteoporosis. So we’ll continue to foster NHS service improvement across the whole UK, spreading best practice and raising standards. But to truly serve the whole country, we’ll be more strategic and facilitative than in the past, using our standards and convening power to empower strong local voices to do the delivery.

Our policy arguments are only as strong as our insights from frontline practice. We’ll continue to build our active network of HCPs from different specialties and disciplines to come together and learn from each other. We’ll educate and train HCPs on osteoporosis in limited, specific areas where we’re best placed, but we’ll drive more change through influencing the Royal Colleges and others to do it at scale. We need to improve our connections with GPs, pharmacists and other professionals. And we’ll work with our clinical members to define what best practice looks like and champion this standard in our engagement with public authorities.

Foster and fund world-class research, focusing our grants programme on pioneering studies which can help close the care gap

Research has always been a top priority for our members. They want the pipeline of new treatments and diagnostic methods to be as strong as possible for the benefit of people now and in the future. That’s why we launched the Research Roadmap and invested record amounts in research over the years since. Our strength is putting the voice of people living with osteoporosis at the heart of every study we fund.

In view of the scale and urgency of the care gap we’ll focus our grants on studies that have a clear and tangible path to benefiting patients. We’ll also favour studies which can fill the evidence gaps in our influencing work. After this strategy, we’ll return to the other parts of our Research Roadmap, including the important causes and genetics agenda.

We’re not an academic think-tank or research institute; we generate and apply evidence to real-life settings. We’ll make sure breakthroughs are quickly put into practice, so that advances in research rapidly make a difference. When we find solutions, our advocacy work will make the case to Government and NHS leaders for the changes needed to put theory into practice.

Read our strategy