Ms Richelle Flanagan:

With Parkinson's, the lack of dopamine affects your muscles being able to work properly and that affects your swallow. People cannot swallow properly and if they get a chest infection, they cannot cough it up because their muscles are not working properly. This is where it is really important to get intervention by a speech therapist to keep those muscles strong for as long as possible to prevent people getting an infection, it going down into their lungs and them ending up in hospital. We know from the services in Holland that physiotherapist intervention has been shown to avoid people going to hospital with fractures. It keeps them safe in terms of falls, etc. There is a lot of Europe-wide research to show the benefit of multidisciplinary care for people with Parkinson's. It would be the same with MS, PSPMSA and Huntington's. All neurological conditions need that input.