One of our core values is to make sure we maintain a strong ethical backbone, in the quest to helping people improve their quality of life. Our focus on education and training means that for some years we have chosen to make a number of charitable contributions to organisations we feel closely aligned to. The majority of these contributions are for educational bursaries to associations to support their members and enable attendance at annual conferences.
Many of these associations and their members have been great advocates of our product, the LimbO. As a result we are proud to be able to offer something back by way of this financial support. For example a donation of £1,000 usually finances the cost of four or five attendees, so its impact can be far reaching. We always suggest that each year the funding is used to enable different individuals from the association to benefit.
We are currently supporting a number of associations including the Association of Orthopaedic Practitioners (AOP), the Orthopaedic and Trauma Alliance (OTA) and the Tissue Viability Society (TVS). We also provide an annual donation to the British Casting Course.
For over 20 years we have run a hospital donation scheme with the NHS which supports plaster teams, podiatrists; IV access teams, physiotherapists and occupational therapists across the UK. The scheme has, to date, raised more than £75,000 for training and development of those in the profession. This is a voluntary contribution rather than a contractual commitment and we take care to ensure that we do not conflict with ethics of the NHS. As a result the sponsorship funds are administered transparently and are provided to teams to be used for items to support their work, facilities for patients, CPD or for charity of their choosing.
Over the years we have been proud to support a few individual sponsorships requests too, most usually to enable specialist practitioners to undertake educational trips or attend conferences. This year we’ve chosen to support one of the Advanced Nurse Practitioners at Southampton University Hospital so that she can attend the European Paediatric Orthopaedic Society meeting as part of the World Health Organisation’s focus on 2020 as the ‘Year of the Nurse and Midwife’.
As Thesis has become more successful, we have been able to donate more. It is important to us to help fund the good work of the teams we are linked with and thank them for their valuable and continued support. And we hope to continue to do so for many years to come.