President's Blog
President’s Blog – 29th April 2024
Investing in membership
April is the start of our financial year for BAA, which means we start afresh with a new budget for the year ahead. We have planned some exciting improvements to several areas of our work. A successful conference in November 2023 means we have more income to invest in you, our members.
Work has started to improve our website for you. While we work on a new look and feel to the site, the main emphasis will be on the member experience, with the functionality improved when you login and access all the member benefits. Our volunteers on board and our various committees continue to work hard to provide resources and benefits to you, so we want to ensure they are easily accessible and joined up.
A new membership software will be integrated with the new website, which will offer us greater flexibility and booking capabilities. It should all seamlessly link together, including with the online Higher Training Scheme (HTS) logbook system.
And then there will be the new BAA e-learning platform, designed to give you much more structured Continuing Professional Development (CPD) opportunities, whatever stage you are at in your career. We have a small committee forming to bring together all this content. While we have a plan of the initial content we want to offer, we would be delighted to hear from you if you have some requests for content.
Elsewhere, we have been out and about representing BAA and engaging with colleagues and peers. I particularly enjoyed spending the day with our Welsh members and colleagues last week at Audiology Cymru. It’s great to see the engagement they have with Welsh government representatives and the progress they are making with their quality assurance across all areas of audiology.
In a couple of weeks, we will be in Northern Ireland for a fully-booked day organised by our NI representative Mandy. It will be great to see you again. I look forward to joining RNID colleagues tomorrow for their deaf awareness event at the Houses of Parliament. Victoria and Laura Turton will also represent the BAA at the BCIG conference. Make sure to say hello to them if you are there, and find out about all the things we are working on for you.
And, finally, a huge congratulations to Board Director Laura Turton, and her fantastic team at NHS Tayside. They were successful at the AHA awards last week, winning the award for ‘Creative and Innovative Practice’ for their Group Hearing Aid Fittings work. Laura presented on this work at our 2023 conference, and we have asked her to talk about it again at our forthcoming heads of service events. See some of you online (9th May) and in-person (12th July) for those.
As ever, you can contact me or any of our board directors here: admin@baaudiology.org
Take care
Sam
BAA President