Trustee Annual Report 2023
A statement from our Chief Executive and President
This year has been another big year for the Society, with so many opportunities for growth. With the introduction of our new Your Voice – Our Strategy 2023 - 2027 at the end of last year, our focus was on achieving the new goals we set ourselves with input from so many of our members.
Collaboration is one of our four core values, and the development of this strategy, which guide all our work over the next five years, is a demonstration of the way we live our values in all we do. We sought input from a wide and diverse range of our members, using a variety of engagement tools, to bring you a strategy we feel represents our ambitions for the future, not just of the Society, but of intensive care as well.
As you’ll read throughout this Trustees’ Annual Report, we have made great progress this year and are looking forward to continuing this in the years to come. As ever, we are focussed on our charitable objective to advance and promote the care and safety of critically ill patients, which we feel is underpinned by our five strategic priorities and two critical enablers.
During the development of our strategy in 2022, we anticipated that the key role we played during the pandemic would result in our involvement in the subsequent COVID-19 Inquiry. Understanding both its importance and potential to take up much of our resources, we included providing evidence to the Inquiry in both our strategy and OIP.
In May this year, we received a Rule 9 request to provide evidence and subsequently worked closely with our legal representatives, our Executive team and key senior managers to produce our statement. We feel the finished product accurately reflects our key role supporting intensive care during a key point in its history. We anticipate we will be called to provide oral evidence to the Inquiry later in 2024.
We also worked this year to build on the foundations of our All-Party Parliamentary Group on Intensive Care. In 2023, meetings of this group focussed on the ICU workforce, and parliamentarians were able to hear from our multi-professional members about the challenges that lay ahead for intensive care.
We were able to help inform and educate them about staffing needs, the expertise required by individuals and the skills mix needed by the team to provide the best patient care, and the vital role ICU plays in the smooth running of a hospital. We were also able to discuss the importance of education, training and CPD to developing careers in intensive care and therefore increasing staff retention.
A key change from our previous strategy was to treat our annual Congress, State of the Art (SOA), as a stand-alone strategic priority. This change works hand in hand with our goal of bringing the running of SOA in-house, utilising the experience and expertise held by our staff team. This year’s congress was our final event working with a professional conference organiser as we transition to a fully in-house team in 2024. We are thrilled to have begun establishing our Events team, and to have convened our SOA Project Board, both of whom will help us to offer an excellent Congress in 2024.
With sustainability embedded into our strategy as one of two critical enablers, we were thrilled this year to publish our first ever carbon footprint report. This was a key step forward in cementing our commitment to making the Society and our activities environmentally sustainable. This report was published on our website and will inform our activities in the years to come.
We also published the first ever Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) census of the intensive care workforce. Our report, Towards an Inclusive Future: A look inside our community, is a landmark document which represents our commitment to a diverse and inclusive future of ICU. More than 350 members of our community participated in the census which informed this report, and we were proud to give voice to the lived experiences of so many of our members.
It’s been another busy year, and we want to thank all our volunteer Council, Trustees, Committees and working groups as well as our staff team members who continue to go above and beyond to support the intensive care community. We were sad to say a fond farewell to our Trustee Stephen Posey at the end of this year but are very grateful for all he has given the Society during his 3 years as a Lay Trustee. We will begin the search for a new Lay Trustee early in 2024.
As we reflect on 2023, we’re proud of the achievements we’ve made and are looking forward to another busy and productive year.