What has TEDct been up to during the pandemic?

TEDct shows resilience through the Covid pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic had a profound impact on all charities, large or small. And it certainly impacted some of the activities of TEDct. We saw many face to face meetings, conferences and webinars having to be cancelled.

According to a COVID-19 Survey 2021 carried out by the Charity Commission over 90% of charities in the UK have been impacted negatively by the pandemic. Luckily, we are a resilient lot – reportedly nearly half of those impacted charities took action to adapt their services to the restrictions caused by the pandemic.

We are pleased to report that TEDct is one of those that adapted.

Whilst our face to face activities slowly ground to a halt, we embraced Zoom, took on new committee members and decided to start moving our support services online.

TEDct launches the Thyroid Eye Disease UK Facebook forum

We knew that thyroid eye disease (TED) patients were suffering terribly during the pandemic. Appointments with medical professionals became impossible to get. Treatment plans and operations were delayed or cancelled. Prescription medications were in short supply creating panic about running out of medication. The psychological impact on this already traumatised group of patients was becoming more apparent.

We decided to act and created Thyroid Eye Disease UK a peer to peer Facebook forum. TEDct wanted to help TED patients directly with medical and patient support. The group uniquely is open to all those that have a professional or personal interest in TED. That said, it is mainly a patient to patient support group. It has become a very successful, supportive, and active group helping 100s of patients daily to get through the perils of TED. We welcome new members so please do come and join us there if your life is affected by TED.

TEDct rebrands and launches new website

We didn’t stop there. We took opportunity during the pandemic to rebrand and along with that we started work on this new website which we are proud to be launching. Our new branding will be rolled out gradually over the next six months. We thank the awesome and talented team at Vuonline who have been extremely supportive of our objectives.

Now that we are virtually through the pandemic we are looking forward to resuming the activities and objectives of TEDct. Please keep an eye on this website or sign up for our next updates.