Scott Reid, Health & Care Board Member Scott Reid, Health & Care Board Member provides an update.

This meeting opened by Chris Reynolds’ thanking Nick Reilly, our previous Chair, who has decided to step down from the Board.  The Board appreciated all the work Nick has done over the past few years and will be missed greatly as he was brought a lot of energy to committee over his tenure as Chair and more recently as an active participant in ICAT and the Great Risk Transfer initiative.

The meeting started by discussing matters arising covering the Board policy positions on key areas of activity.  The policy issues cover key topics where we have instigated working parties to investigate area such as: antibiotic resistance; e-cigarettes/vaping; mental health; social care; and diabetes.  The Board is keen to develop key messages on what is the IFoA position is on certain topics which will help the IFoA communicate to external stakeholders on public interest or insurance industry issues.

We then discussed what are our objectives are for 2021, where we referred to members feedback from a recent member engagement survey.  Interestingly, our members fed back that they valued online context such as webinars and interesting/challenging papers and articles.  This feedback is useful to help shape our objectives and to priorities our activities over the coming year.

Climate change and sustainability is another hot topic that is an immediate priority where the H&C Board has to create an engagement plan to address the needs of their community by the end of 2020 and implement it during 2021.

Graham Lee, representing the Lifelong Learning committee, provided an update to discuss their plan to have a regular monthly webinar where we would have a range of speakers each month on different topics e.g. Brexit, Climate change, Social care and mental health.  This will be advertised shortly.

Vicky Gardner, representing the Research committee, provided an update on the status of our current working parties.  Highlights in summary include:

  • AI/Automation will shortly be publishing their paper
  • Diabetes working party has made good progress on establishing a funded research project supported by PartnerRe, Zurich, Pacific Life Re, Legal & General and Swiss Re. More information on the selected research partner will be published shortly.
  • Electronic medical records has just been set up and is making good progress
  • Population Health Management after a successful initial paper has been restructured to continue their research.
  • New working parties that is in the process of being set up include Mental Illness, Climate Change and The Role of the Actuary in H&C
  • A proposed new working party on Social care should be advertised shortly so it interested please keep an eye out for this.
  • A hot topic event is planned for February next year on the topic on Genomics in insurance

We finished the meeting on the ICAT workstream activity where several Board members and other active volunteers have made a valuable contribution to the ICAT Health & Care papers and blogs.  Our Chair Chris Reynolds’ thanked everyone involved for contributing to this where we have successfully published six papers to date which can be found on the Pandemics Hub and ICAT workstream webpages.