Parkinson’s UK Preston & District Branch Update

It has been a while since our last meeting took place in March, so we thought it was time to update you all on the current situation. So many things have changed because of Covid 19, but rest assured that we, the Committee, are still here & are still working for you.

We were hoping by now that we would be in a position to start returning to our usual activities, with some modification around social distancing. However, the reintroduction of restrictions in the city of Preston & the advice from Parkinsons UK have prevented this. We have taken the decision reluctantly to delay the restart of Circuit Training & Yoga until the New Year, hopefully in January 21.  As soon as a date has been arranged, we will circulate the details.

We have also had to make a decision not to hold any group meetings before December. On a positive note, we would like to invite all members & friends to a ‘Jacob’s Join’ type get together at St. Anthony’s on Wednesday the 9th December at 7pm. This will be instead of our usual Christmas Party. Everyone can bring their own food, crockery and cutlery, to comply with guidelines & keep everyone as safe as possible. The group will provide tea & coffee & a drink from the bar. This will be a great opportunity to meet up & see one another. Can everyone who wishes to attend please confirm numbers to myself at

malcolmtwright@hotmail.com. This is vital so that in conjunction with St Anthonys, a risk assessment & social distancing measures can be put in place.

As a committee, we are concerned that we do not lose the following that we have here in Preston. This year we went onto Facebook as Preston Parkinsons Group. Membership has been steadily growing & we would urge all of you that have access to social media to join so that we can give you information about our activities & help with anything you need to know.

This year, as you will appreciate, we have not been able to do many of our collections and so our fundraising has been greatly reduced. We have donated £2,000 to Parkinsons UK following their appeal to branches for help because of their lack of income. The group is still solvent but we need to conserve funds to cover Circuit Training, Yoga & our other commitments for the coming year. It is with regret that we have had to abandon the Christmas Hampers for this year. The cost & logistics of this operation make it impractical. We are very sorry that this has to be the case & we hope that you will all understand the reasons why. We will make every effort to reinstate hampers for next year.

Please can we ask you to be patient, we will not be defeated by this & we will come back to something near normality. Let us make the most use of the Facebook group as we can to maintain contact. If anyone has problems finding us on there, please email Malcolm on malcolmtwright@hotmail.com for assistance.

To finish, thank you all for your efforts in the past, on collections, yoga, circuit training, helping with meetings and raffles and turning up to support each other. Please stay sane, stay safe and we hope to see as many of you as possible at St. Anthonys on the 9th December at 7pm.

Best wishes from everyone on the committee.