At last - the Parky Charter Parliamentary Petition!

Please sign for better Parkinson's care

On Monday afternoon, the latest weapon in a fight for better Parkinson’s care finally popped up on the Parliamentary Petitions website. The petition, from the Movers and Shakers podcast team, calls for the measures in our Parky Charter to be implemented, and for the Health Secretary Wes Streeting to keep the promise he made us of an extra 62,000 neurology appointments every year.

Getting this petition online has been an extremely lengthy process. After taking the Parky Charter, along with 20,000 signatures, to Downing Street last April on World Parkinson’s Day we pondered our next move. We knew that a Parliamentary petition would be a way of keeping up the momentum behind the charter, with a new target of 100,000 signatures to have a shot at a debate in Parliament.

Meanwhile, Gillian Lacey-Solymar had come up with the brilliant idea that we should make a pop video, singing her adapted version of Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive. We knew that “We Will Survive” needed not just to raise awareness of Parkinson’s but to have a “call to action” - and that would be a link in the end credits to our Parliamentary petition with viewers urged to sign.

But what we did not reckon with was Rishi Sunak’s decision to call an early General Election in July. That meant the petitions site cloosed down pending the arrival of a new Parliament. Then there was what seemed an interminable process where first MPs had to be elected to a new Petitions Committee and then we had to join a lengthy queue of campaigners with a wide range of causes. Our petition went into the checking process in early January and finally on Monday, after a couple of tweaks, it was live.

We now have six months to get to that 100,000 target. So please sign it and then get your friends and relatives to sign it. The world’s fastest grwoing neurological disease affects 150,000 people in the UK - they wait too long to get diagnosed, too long between neurologist appointments, and struggle to get the multifaceted care they need. We can and must do better.

Some people have found it hard to track down the petition - just to be clear, if you see the word “petition” underlined in this post, just click on it and you will find yourself at the right place. Or you can cut and paste the following link into your web browser

https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/713714