Putting our membership at the heart of what we do

I have the pleasure of being responsible for the College’s membership, policy and communications teams. The Communications and External Affairs Directorate is a team of 16 of us, who are passionate about ensuring that our fellows and members are central to the work of the College, and that we continue to build a strong, supportive and inclusive membership and professional body.

Whilst fellows and members always have the traditional and important role of electing their Council members, there are other ways that we have been seeking to develop input from our membership. Two years ago, the College set up its Membership Engagement Panel. This is a panel of fellows and members of all career stages, whose views we seek so they can contribute to the work, strategy and direction of their professional body. Over the years, we have had useful contributions and feedback from members on subjects as diverse as international membership, events, perioperative care, our website, fundraising, end of life care and more. This is now a growing cohort of over 2,800, and we would welcome any new fellows and members to participate.

The College’s independence is our asset, and we speak on behalf of our fellows and members to influence, raise awareness and effect change. Over the course of 2019, the policy team has brought the views of the College’s membership into the heart of policy formation and dissemination in a way never before done by the College, or the vast majority of membership organisations. This work has also been highlighted by the membership engagement body Memberwise as a beacon of good practice in its blogs and social media, with the College seen as ‘leading the way’. These are some of the various ways that the team sought the views of our membership to help shape our work: 

• as well as creating our manifesto for a 21st Century Health Service the policy team also produced a brief guide outlining how our membership could campaign on behalf of the College. It included sample questions, opportunities, and tips for building relationships with their candidates. Importantly, the team made the point that the College is a non-party political organisation, and asked them not to engage in partisan political activity on behalf of the College or endorse a specific candidate or party – even if they are in agreement with our manifesto. The team also asked them to share their experience on social media, and feed back to them on how it went
• following on from the College’s consultation response to NHS Improvement’s Interim People Plan, we wanted to continue the conversation and get more input for an evidence based approach. To help with this, and also with the development of a College workforce strategy, the team asked our fellows and members what they thought should be the priorities of the College’s workforce strategy aligned to the key themes identified in the NHS Interim People Plan. Responses from the membership helped shape an additional document to NHS Improvement around the People Plan - Views from the Frontline. The team then sent this to both Health Education England and NHS Improvement, and got an immediate positive response and request for meetings to discuss
• the policy team sought the opinions of members on what policy issues would be important for perioperative care that inputted into a paper for the Centre for Perioperative Care Board to decide the final two policy projects. The policy team then held a focus group with our membership to get their early input and thoughts around how these projects could be shaped.

We welcome the views of our fellows and members, and would encourage anybody who would like to join the membership engagement panel to contact the Membership Engagement team at engage@rcoa.ac.uk.  

Kathryn Stillman