The IBMS monthly statement - August 2022

To ensure that we impact UK Government policy for decades to come, the IBMS will rightly build on our ability to speak and stand up for our members’ interests and extend the hard-won reach that many of our senior staff and members helped us to secure over the course of the pandemic.

Indeed, as part of our 2022 strategy, Council decided that we need to continue to develop our existing capability to impact the UK Government’s policy in favour of the profession so we have employed a political lobbying and media relations firm – with a view to establish our own policy role in the future to pick up the work we do.

With the services of a whole company at our disposal, analysing government documents, advising us on next steps and then making contact with their UK government contacts (after we have agreed on points of action), the potential of what we can achieve will be much greater at the stage we are at currently.

After finding an award-winning agency, and having trialled the skills and services they offer, I can say that I believe we are taking the right step for the profession. The company works for other professional bodies and companies in healthcare and diagnostics, and they were incredibly quick to fully understand our key messages and mission and reframe them for political and policy audiences – something our members and the profession will benefit from in the short and long term.

Over the next 12 months we hope to utilise their expertise in all four home nations to make deeper and wider inroads at the government level, to build new and broaden existing relationships, and to better relay information from the profession in ways that influence key decision and policymakers across the UK.

With the UK COVID-19 inquiry beginning, the backlog in planned care, community diagnostics centres emerging, networking and transformational projects ongoing, we have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to harness our biomedical workforce and create new and exciting roles.

With a government committed to investment in Life Sciences and expanding the UK diagnostics industry, we hope to keep the biomedical science profession’s hopes, ideas and concerns at the forefront of the conversation – helping to develop the ways in which our services are understood and supported in the future.

In these politically uncertain times, the IBMS will continue to promote, support and progress our members’ careers and profession – whatever the government of the day.