29 September 2021
Chris Reynolds, IFoA Health & Care Board Chair provides an update.
On Wednesday 22 September we held the first Health & Care (H&C) Board meeting of the new session. Each new session brings changes to the Board and this year was no exception. After conveying our thanks to Emily Demetriades and Graham Lee, both of whom stepped down at the end of the last session, we welcomed our new Board members, Colin Redman and Zoe Woodroffe.
Colin brings deep experience in social care – something that will no doubt be a focus for the coming session – and Zoe is the new Chair of the Health and Care Lifelong Learning Sub-committee, which oversees the education and continuing professional development needs of our members.
Additionally, we congratulated Richard Purcell on becoming the Deputy Chair. Having served on the Board for a number of years Richard’s knowledge and expertise will be instrumental in helping the Board meet its objectives.
A key focus of our meeting was to reflect on the last session and determine our priorities for the session ahead. Looking back we noted the following highlights:
- A Health & Care blog was published following every Board meeting and a membership survey was conducted to better understand member's needs and engagement.
- The Health & Care Board remained active in supporting the ICAT initiative and several Board members joined the C-19 ARG.
- A number of new working parties were established covering topics such as climate change, electronic health records, mental illness, and the role of the Actuary.
- A sustainability sub-group was launched that developed an engagement plan for health & care.
- Regular Health & Care webinars were held across the 2020-2021 session.
- A Health & Care Community was established on LinkedIn with the aim of fostering further engagement with our members.
- Initial steps were taken in establishing closer links with the Data Science community.
Looking forward we’ve started to explore our key themes for the current session. There are at least 3 themes emerging:
- Following the Government’s announcements, it’s clear that Social Care will be a big focus and the Board needs to ensure it is proactive here;
- Sustainability will continue to be one of our key themes and we will need to flesh out some of the specific challenges (e.g. sustainability issues related to an aging population) in this area;
- Health & care-related topics around the theme of data and the use of data science techniques.
The Board recognised that there is more work to do in clearly articulating these themes and embedding them in our objectives, particularly in relation to data science. To help build our understanding we were pleased to welcome Asif John and John Ng as guests to provide an overview of the work of the Data Science Community, including the Research Section. Not only were they able to share highlights of the work being undertaken, but also the way in which they work together as a community. The Board can no doubt learn and find inspiration from the Data Science Community.
This will be my final year Chairing the Health & Care Board and I’m more determined than ever to ensure the Board retains and builds on its reputation of being an active Board that drives forward member engagement and focuses on the areas of interest to the Health & Care Community. You can help shape this too, so if you’ve not done so yet, please consider joining our H&C Community on LinkedIn.