The BGS has embarked on a 10-month process to develop its next three-year Strategic Plan. This will guide the work of the BGS over the period April 2023 to March 2026. We want BGS members and anyone with an interest in older people’s healthcare to feed into the development of the new Strategic Plan. This will ensure it is rooted in the reality of delivering health and social care for older people across the UK and is informed by what you think the BGS’s priorities should be in improving the care older people receive.
So – we invite your input. We'd love you to share your thoughts on:
- What you like about BGS services and support, what we should do more of, and what you think we should do less of.
- How you think we can be more influential, using our expert voice to inform programmes, services, clinical quality and research agendas.
- What you get from your membership and how you like to engage with our educational meetings.
- How you think we should balance our work across different settings in acute, primary and community care, and the four nations.
- Your radical and ambitious thoughts about our role in shaping care for older people that is genuinely person-centred, at the right time and in the right place.
- How you’d like the BGS to fight the battles of a workforce shortage across all professions, a post-COVID backlog and competition for resources.
You can contribute in several ways. On the first day of our Spring Meeting, 6 April 2022, we launched a membership survey. Every BGS member has received a personal link to complete the survey, and we are sending reminders up to the closing date of the end of May. The survey asks questions about what you value most and find most useful about current BGS services. It invites you to prioritise the things that will enable us to have most impact and influence on older people’s healthcare. It’s a five-minute survey with drop down options and plenty of scope for your comments.
We also ran an open session at the Spring Meeting for members to discuss the proposed Strategic Plan with our CEO and Hon Secretary. You can email us (ceo@bgs.org.uk), phone us or tweet to give your thoughts. And you can use the BGS’s Forum and networks, and its Committee, Council and SIG meetings over the coming months to discuss priorities.
We’ll be analysing the results of the survey in June and gathering the many inputs together, including interviews with key stakeholders. All of this will feed into a workshop for the BGS Board at the end of July, after which we will begin drafting the Plan.
Board members will revise and refine this, so that a final draft can be signed off at the Board meeting on 28 October. We will then publish the draft Plan for you to digest, before asking you to approve it at the online BGS AGM on 11 November.
| Please don’t hold back from sharing your thoughts on how the Society can have more impact. We have a fantastic opportunity to harness the skills, knowledge and strength of our 4500 members to transform how older people experience care. Help us to chart our strategic direction for the next three years, and to achieve our ambitions. |
