The Canadian Arthritis Patient Alliance (CAPA) is celebrating an incredible 20 years of working to improve the lives of millions of Canadians living with arthritis. We’re a national, volunteer, and patient-led organization with all of our board members living with arthritis. In 2002, we began advocating and meeting with health care decision-makers across the country on the most urgent and pressing concerns affecting our patient community. The concerns range from timely access to medications and diagnosis by a rheumatologist to accessing health services such as surgery, tests, and physical and occupational therapy.
With the generous donation of time from our esteemed Medical Advisory Committee, our board has worked hard to identify gaps in knowledge that people living with arthritis experience daily. Once an information gap has been identified, we go on to develop resources to help other patients like us to be able to manage the disease effectively. We’ve created user-friendly tools like our methotrexate resource, pregnancy and parenting resource, and living with chronic pain resource. Please take a look at our website to check out all of our amazing tools and information.
Over the past few years, we’ve also worked hard with our rheumatologists to provide our patient community with the latest information on COVID-19 in immunocompromised patients. CAPA recently hosted a webinar with Dr. Janet Pope on Vaccines for People Living with Autoimmune Disease, which can be found on our YouTube channel.
For the first time, CAPA has partnered with Sparkplug Coffee. During September, 10 to 15 per cent of all sales from the Coffee for CAPA fundraiser will go to helping our organization continue to provide people living with arthritis with practical tools and resources to help them better manage their disease. Please consider ordering some delicious coffee and supporting our work! sparkplug.coffee/capa-fundraiser.
Now more than ever, we need strong, informed voices from the patient community to ensure the needs of people with arthritis are at the forefront of health policy in Canada.
