Welcome to Beat's first Impact Report.
In April 2016, we set off with a new and ambitious five-year strategy with goals to dramatically increase the number of people we help, to change policy and practice so that people got better and faster treatment, and to bring about increased understanding of these serious mental illnesses.
This new strategy showed our commitment to make the greatest possible impact for people with eating disorders. After examining the evidence that early treatment is crucial to a rapid and sustained recovery, it became clear that the single most important change we could make was to focus our energies on empowering people to get help quickly.
Our new focus on helping as many people as quickly as possible has resulted in considerable changes to the way we work. Our Helpline and support services concentrate on empowering sufferers and families to seek help quickly, our campaigning centres on ensuring fast access to better treatments, and our key messages of early intervention are centre stage in all our education work and our public communications.
The result is an organisation that is united around the mission we collectively work towards, and helping four times more people at the end of 2016-17 than at the beginning.
This transformation would not have been possible without our generous supporters. This report gives us an opportunity to thank each and every one of you for giving us the opportunity to make a positive impact on those affected by eating disorders across the UK.
I invite you to read on to find out more about the impact we made in the first year of our five-year strategy, some highlights of the changes we have made since April 2017, and the goals we’re setting for the year ahead to make the biggest possible difference for people affected by eating disorders.