The five main Spinal Injuries Charities in the UK – Aspire, the Back-Up Trust, Spinal Research, SIA and Spinal Injuries Scotland – have long worked together under the umbrella body Spinal Injuries Together (SIT). We’ve shared information and expertise, looked for ways we can complement the Services offered by each other and, where possible, directly worked together on joint ventures.

For Aspire, this collaborative working is vital – it means we’re not duplicating the work of anyone else, nor wasting our money on things already being picked up by our colleagues at the other charities. As a result, our funds go further and, together, we can ensure we better respond to the needs of those with spinal injuries.

Last week the five charities got together to see how we can further strengthen our working relationships. There was a great attendance, and discussions were wide ranging, looking at everything from how we work directly with newly injured patients to how we publicise the issues surrounding spinal injury. It’s appropriate that, in the week of Spinal Injuries Awareness Day, we all agreed that by working closer together we’ll all achieve more.

Each charity will be taking the suggestions made at the SIT conference and looking at how to implement them – of course, that’s not a process we’ll be undertaking in isolation and we can look forward to plenty of conversations with each other in the coming months. And at the heart of all those conversations is a shared belief that those with spinal injuries deserve the best service from our charities, regardless of which one of us is providing it.