President's Blog

President’s Blog – 14th April 2024

Building relationships; fostering alliances

BAA Board Directors have spent some time with our colleagues across the profession over the last 12 to 18 months. In 2019, you may remember that BAA withdrew from discussions about a potential College of Audiology? In 2023, we approached some groups again and started informal discussions about a potential way forward. The group has only met a few times to date, and progress is slow. However, we continue to meet, to at least look at ways to work together.

More of BAA’s collaborative time has been spent on the Hearing Loss and Deafness Alliance. This group, formed in 2010, has approximately thirty member organisations from across UK Audiology. Representatives of the different organisations are invited to meet up to four times per year to discuss current issues in Audiology, looking for areas of commonality on which we can work. There have been successes for the Hearing Loss and Deafness Alliance (the Alliance), such as working together to stop North Staffs decommissioning spreading; creating a commissioning framework that helped stop decommissioning; publishing a JSNA guide to get public health officials involved, and forward planning for changes to commissioning regs when the Joint Strategic Needs Asessment locally would still matter.

This year, the Alliance has new strategic priorities to focus on, which BAA helped adopt. As a profession, we face similar pressures, with Workforce top of that list, closely followed by Quality and Access to Services. We will talk more about these priorities, and what we hope to achieve, in future blogs.

Recent Alliance discussions have focused on the revision of the Alliance strategy, a systems document (which will be released soon) and developing other Alliance policy issues. The Alliance also has a new website for those who wish to know more about the organisation and it’s work streams: https://www.hearinglossanddeafnessalliance.com/

Sam