Healthcare communications agency emotive has teamed up with Rare Disease UK to develop a public awareness campaign, which will be launched ahead of Rare Disease Day on 28 February.
The Campaign, which will highlight the large and often hidden scale and impact of rare diseases, aims to ‘energise’ the public to discover more about rare diseases.
According to Rare Disease UK, which is run by charity group Genetic Alliance UK, more than 7% of the UK population is affected by a rare disease at some point in their lives, but despite this public awareness is reported low.
Jayne Spink, chair of Rare Disease UK, said: “We need to change this if we are to reduce feelings of isolation, and increase understanding of the common issues faced by patients and carers.
“Better awareness can also help to increase access to support services and treatment, and secure funding and engagement in research.”
Since 2009, the group has been working with health departments across the UK to implement the UK strategy for Rare Diseases to ensure patients living with rare conditions have access to services, treatment and support.
Partnering with emotive, Rare Disease UK hopes that the agency can bring creativity to their campaign.
Chris Edmonds, managing director at emotive, said: “We were privileged to work with Rare Disease UK at our offsite annual conference in the summer where we helped them map out a communication strategy for 2018 and beyond.
“The team at emotive have worked extremely hard and used our deep knowledge of rare diseases to come up with a great creative concept and we’re excited to see it go live later in February.”