Tinnitus

What next after Tinnitus Week?


It’s been a couple of weeks since Tinnitus Week came to an end, and we have now had the time and opportunity to reflect on all that happened and what we achieved.

I’m immensely proud of what the BTA achieved as an organisation, and what the tinnitus community achieved globally.

Some of the things we launched during Tinnitus Week might have got a little bit lost in the flurry of activities that were happening. So, I’d just like to do a quick recap to remind you of some of the highlights – you can read more about each one by clicking the links.

I’m incredibly pleased to announce our funding of a PhD in tinnitus research in partnership with Action on Hearing Loss. Our PhD is an important step towards encouraging the best students to become involved in tinnitus research in the UK, and advancing developments that could change the lives of more than seven million people.

We launched our Tinnitus Manifesto and really put out there the need for increased investment in tinnitus research from the UK Government and from further afield. This need was also raised in the House of Lords and we received a commitment from the Health Secretary to look at funding for tinnitus research.

At the same time we launched our Tinnitus Manifesto, we published our petition calling for more funding for tinnitus research, which at the time of writing this blog, has collected over 88,000 signatures, which is amazing. I’m incredibly proud of this achievement and the response from the tinnitus community to get to that number.

Finally, we were also able to launch our work, in partnership with Help Musicians, to look at the  impact tinnitus has on musicians as well. Musicians can often be exposed to high levels of sound, meaning many are at risk of hearing loss and tinnitus. However, the relationship between tinnitus and its impact on musicians has not been rigorously researched. If you are a working musician and would like to take part in the research, our survey can be found here.

So you can see we had so much happening in the week, and it’s incredibly positive and powerful to see all of that. I’m really delighted with where we’ve got to. There’s been so much hard work put in to get us there. But of course, the hard work doesn’t stop here.

There’s so much more to do now to make sure that we really take advantage of the momentum we built up during Tinnitus Week. And although there’s lots of excitement here during Tinnitus Week, we will be here fighting for people living with tinnitus, campaigning for better research, and campaigning for increased investment 52 weeks of the year. We will continue to do that spade work behind the scenes to really campaign to move tinnitus and tinnitus research up the agenda.

Finally, I’d just like to say thank you as well to the people who have worked on Tinnitus Week. It’s not something that comes together easily. It takes months and months of work to pull this together. Internally, we’ve had a fantastic team that’s worked on this, but also internationally there’s been huge amounts of work put into making sure that Tinnitus Week is a coordinated effort globally. The work of our partner organisations, Tinnitus Hub, the American Tinnitus Association, Action on Hearing Loss and others have put in has really been immense. And course, our thanks must go to our sponsors, whose support is very much appreciated.

In the meantime, I can say we are currently looking at how to really capitalise and work on this and take it forward from here. I’m already looking forward to expanding Tinnitus Week and doing better and bigger things next year. And of course, if you haven’t already done so, please do sign our petition!







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