Our Trustees' Annual Report 2022
A statement from our Chief Executive and President
2022 has been a year of change and growth. As we left the pandemic behind us, we saw intensive care begin to stabilise, allowing us to pause and reflect on next steps.
The most important aspect of this year was to continue supporting our community as they tried to make sense of what they had experienced and get back to a normal pace of work life. Thanks to the Covid Healthcare Support Appeal (CHSA) we launched our first fully funded executive Leadership Programme (LeaP1) for senior leaders across the professions in intensive care. Our Thriving at Work Project continued to provide support and see initiatives such as our CHSA funded ‘Peer Support’ training entering the second year. We also prepared for phase 2 of the GAINS study, run in collaboration with Wellcome Trust and a team of international researchers to establish if a brief cognitive intervention could reduce the number of intrusive memories in staff working in the pandemic.
With the establishment of our All-Party Parliamentary Group on Intensive Care, we were able to lay the groundwork to build on two key areas that needed immediate focus by the Government: workforce and rehabilitation. Throughout the year, Parliamentarians heard from our multi-professional Council members and patients to help inform and educate them about intensive care.
We also moved into the 2nd year of our Immediate Climate Strategy and completed the complex financial move to a new investment management company and divested from fossil fuels.
Our strategic partnerships became stronger, solidified out of one unified goal of supporting intensive care during the pandemic. Collaboration is the first of our core values and is key to making sustainable change. This year we have continued to build these relationships across all areas of our work. We have also launched joint projects in ultrasound and guidance, as well as working more closely with NHSE and the devolved nations.
As with all work, data is key! It enables us to assess, grow and bridge gaps to make a better tomorrow. This year, we made a conscious effort to ensure we better understood our membership and wider community. We started this journey by embedding a new membership database and website. We also ran our equality, diversity and inclusion census which enabled us to deep dive into our community to help us better understand the needs of all those we represent.
As our workstreams and activities increased during the year, we needed to grow our staff team to enable us to deliver more for our beneficiaries.
This year has been another busy year and we thank all of 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.
This year, saw the end of our five-year strategy and the rest of this report will outline the final successes from this roadmap that has served as a moral compass for the Society and helped us to become the organisation we are today.
As one good thing came to an end, another one can begin. At the end of 2022, we published our new Your Society – Our Strategy 2023 – 2027.
Our new strategy was created and designed collaboratively to implement an ambitious vision to grow the Intensive Care Society. We want the strategy to enable us to deliver quality services and products that meet the changing needs of todays and tomorrow’s members and our wider beneficiaries.
We continue to stay focused on delivering our charitable object throughout this strategy: to advance and promote the care and safety of critically ill patients. It is further underpinned by two new critical enablers of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, and Governance, Financial Resilience and Environmental Sustainability.
We developed this strategy with the input of a wide range of interested parties and using a variety of engagement methods including workshops, focus groups, interviews and surveys.
We are a small organisation, and we rely on collaboration between staff and volunteers to enable us to deliver our activities. Together this enables the Society to punch well above our weight and support a wide range of activities to make an impact and advance and promote the care and safety of critically ill patients.
We are grateful to everyone for the time they have given to develop our strategy and we look forward to continuing to work with you as we deliver it together over the next five years. Thank you.
We launched our new strategy to the intensive care community at our Annual Members Meeting on the 6 December 2022.