My First 100 Days

Like all recent US Presidential terms of office, the BASHH presidential term starts in January. Great significance has been placed on their impact in the first 100 days, since Franklin D. Roosevelt coined the term in 1993. Fortunately for me I am not dealing with a Great Depression, but there are some major challenges for our specialty which I aim to address.

January saw a series of meetings with PHE and the Dept of Health to discuss Integrated Sexual Service Specification – you’ll be interested to hear that the document is imminent and includes a recommendation regarding commissioning training. In February, at the PHE External Advisory Group on Sexual Health, Reproductive Health & HIV there was an opportunity to feed into the new ‘Cross-charging’ guidance and contribute to a new ‘Consensus Statement for Sexual Health, Reproductive Health and HIV’ (SHRHHIV). I have had several meetings with the Faculty of Sexual and Reproductive Health to discuss matters of mutual concern – their President and CEO attended our March Board meeting where we discussed nurse sub-dermal training and STIF. March saw many weathers, including more snow, that did not deter the Board from meeting when significant decisions were made including supporting a joint meeting with IUSTI in Tallinn Autumn 2019. I had a very productive meeting with Noel Gill and Team at Collingdale exploring issues such as the threat of GC antimicrobial resistance, NHS Digital, Chlamydia Screening programme evaluation. The meeting was followed the next day by an excellent OGM jointly arranged by Bacterial SIG and PHE.

Amongst these meeting, I have met with BASHH Wales members and discussed the next steps following the PHW Sexual Health Services review. As part of my engagement plan, I have dates in the diary to meet with Doctors in Training, BASHH Scotland members and SAS doctors, with an invitation to all BASHH regional chairs to invite me to their local meetings.

I am enthused by the commitment I see from our members, in difficult times, to ensure their services are delivering high quality patient centred care. Please adopt the ‘Hot’ Six, I am reassured by data analysts that you can get most of the information from your standardised data collection.

A reminder that the ‘Save Our Sexual Health Services’ campaign continues, we hope to present our findings and data to parliamentarians before the summer recess.
So, you can now judge me on my impact to date, or to quote Obama ‘…but it’s probably going to be the first thousand days that makes the difference ‘