 I am looking at the experiences of people who have multiple sclerosis and that's a progressive neurological disorder. Some people might know it as MS and the population that I'm looking at is I'm looking at people who use an assistance dog. Now assistance dogs, they're dogs who've been specially trained to mitigate the difficulties that disabled people have. By that I mean they've been trained specially to help them around the house so they can open and close doors, empty washing machines or fill washing machines. They can go for help if a person who's disabled falls they can help with balance and most importantly they give people confidence to go out on their own and know that if there is a problem that the dog will be there for them. This is my assistance dog Tori. She's been trained so that she can come and settle like she's doing at the moment for long periods of time and she won't look for attention and she looks like she's resting but actually they are ready to go at a moment's notice and while she's wearing her jacket she knows she's working and she knows to behave herself and then it's very important at the end of the day to take her jacket off and then she can go back to behaving like a dog and she'll go and roll around and run around and be a lunatic really and but she knows when she's at work she's at work. The OU can give support on a number of different levels academically the support is superb they run a doctoral training programme so that if you're feeling under confident in your research skills there's maximum support for you there as much or as little as you want there's such a vibrant learning community here you meet people from all over the world you get inspired from other students and you get to think of things in a way that you wouldn't have thought of. I found out that the way I was treated as a person with a disability when I was with the dog was totally different from when I was without the dog the way the the public interacted with me and that's the research really that I'm looking at why people with disabilities can get treated very negatively by the public either ignored or evil hostility hate crime whereas when they have a dog they seem to get very positive interactions with society and I wanted to find out what's happening in the dynamic between dog person with disabilities and society what's happening in that dynamic why does the dog change that dynamic between that person with disabilities with impairments and society so that's what I'm looking at the ethos that comes across from the OU is that they want you to succeed they want to remove barriers for your learning so from my point of view I'm a disabled researcher and one of my anxieties coming here in the first place was would I be able to manage the campus would I would I be able to work in spaces and they went out of their way to ensure that that everywhere I went was completely accessible and it took away some of the stress and has taken away all all my barriers to learning so one of the fascinating findings that these dogs I found that these dogs can do is that as somebody's MS progresses the dogs can be trained up they can be upskilled to do things that now need need to be done so for example I had participants who were on the verge of needing to have a carer come in to put them to bed and they didn't want to lose that independence they wanted to go to bed when they wanted to go to bed so the dogs were trained to help them lift a leg that they couldn't lift so they could put themselves to bed and then as other things were happening as they were losing more abilities the dogs could get trained up again so it can be a very empowering thing