31 March 2022
Vicky Gardner provides an update on the Health and Care Board activities.
On Tuesday 22nd March, we held our first Health & Care Board meeting of 2022. We were happy to welcome two guest speakers, Guilia Boccarini and Nihar Shembavnekar, from the research centre of The Health Foundation, REAL Centre - The Health Foundation. REAL provide independent analysis and research for use in decision-making in health and social care. They presented their report on the potential future funding gap for adult social care in the UK, examining the difference between what is available under current projected budgets and what will be needed to support the growing demand in future. The annual funding gap figures they presented to us were eye-watering and reinforces the need for our industry to do more in looking at the long-term costs of adult social care and what products we can offer to people to help better prepare for the financial burden. Our guest speakers were very timely as we have just launched our new Social Care Research working party! If you would like to get involved in this, please register your interest on the volunteer vacancies page by 1st May.
A few of our working parties are in the process of closing down and so we discussed the new working parties we hope to start soon, which fit with the Board’s strategic objectives:
- Climate change
- Data availability
- Data techniques
Keep your eye on the IFoA newsletters to find out when these vacancies go live or join our LinkedIn page to get updates on this and other health and care topics.
Our existing working parties have been hard at work too. The mental health working party held an awareness week in February with blogs and podcasts, wrapping up with a panel discussion. The commissioned research into diabetes mortality and morbidity risk is ongoing and we hope that both of these working parties will help us with our aim of promoting discussion and providing evidence for how we can make sure insurance products are accessible to those with underlying health conditions.
We also discussed the upcoming hybrid IFoA conference in London on 22-23 June. This replaces a number of old conferences, including the Health, Care and Protection Conference, to help facilitate greater cross-practice collaboration. It will be the first in-person event since before the pandemic and, as a hybrid event, will give people the opportunity to reconnect with people in person or the flexibility to participate remotely. There will be some great content at the conference but we’re always looking for new content to share with IFoA members. The Health & Care Lifelong Learning Sub-Committee have monthly webinar slots dedicated to health and care topics for this purpose. We had a good discussion on how to continue to improve in how we share content that is relevant to our members and how to make the best use of research in academia and from other actuarial associations across the globe. If you have anything of interest to share at one of our webinars, or would be interested in hearing about something specific, please do get in touch to let us know.
On the subject of sharing knowledge and collaborating, we also had an update about the digital community that should be ready for piloting towards the end of this year. We hope this will enable us to communicate with IFoA members much more easily and share ideas back and forth. One of our aims as a Board is to better represent the interests of IFoA members working in health and care across the globe, so establishing an easy-to-use digital platform should be a big step forward in hearing different voices and enabling better collaboration across our community.