CEO's Column

KEVIN BAMPTON

CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER

As we head into the final month of the Society’s operating year, it’s been a great opportunity to reflect on what we have done well this year and the opportunities for us to do better as a Head Office team supporting the Society.

Practically all of our visible successes have been because we have been able to amplify and support the work of volunteers. It’s been a year of highprofile visibility in the press and social media, spurred on by the production of high-quality technical content entirely produced by groups of individuals working together on a voluntary basis. It’s phenomenal to look at the COVID-19 hub and to think that all of that material was produced by people, outside of their paid employment.

We, at Head Office, are working on how we can better harness the expertise and skills of as wide a range of the membership as possible so we can make an even bigger impact. Of the 1400 members of the Society, most of the activity of the Society is driven by around 5% of the membership to whom we are immensely grateful. We want to ensure that when you offer your time of expertise to the Society we:

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Find opportunities to make the best of your skills and knowledge;

Promote diversity and equality to ensure that we make the best of the experiences and skills of everyone;

Give clear support and guidance to you when volunteering your time;

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Provide feedback to you to help with their professional development;

Promote and internally advertise roles which can be taken on based on expertise and peer election, but also ones which enable your development through peer engagement;

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Construct opportunities in a way that enables a professional benefit to you when you step forward to help others.

In order to do this, we are reviewing our volunteer support arrangements, as well as widening the opportunities to take on roles at each level of the Society. However, we would really benefit from feedback and suggestions from any member around the activities you would like to be involved with.

This is part of a broader review of our strategic aims as a Society. I will be doing a number of videos in conversation with Board members, to explore the challenges we face and the priorities that the Board has recommended for the Society in promoting occupational hygiene and the occupational hygiene profession over the next five years. The strategic aims that the Board and Head Office recommend for the Society are: To set standards and benchmarks of practice for all engaged in occupational hygiene services in the UK and to work with the regulator to promote them

To support the professional development of members of the Faculty regardless of the stage of their career through review and development of curriculum and qualification provision

To promote the value of the profession and Chartered membership through communication, campaigning and enhanced design of the journey to qualification

To support the development of Occupational Hygiene as a discipline, science and career through work with Higher and Further Education partners

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We, at Head Office, are working on how we can better harness the expertise and skills of as wide a range of the membership as possible so we can make an even bigger impact..

To develop and enhance the technical and scientific base of the Society by investigating partnerships to provide research and technical insights and to share the benefits with members

This reflects many of the priorities that members have identified in the survey that we launched earlier this month. We really do want to hear your views on how we are doing and what we can do better.

As well as the Breathe Freely Campaign, you will increasingly see reference to the concept of Sustainable Workplace Health. We think this encapsulates the core values and methods of occupational hygiene as part of a broader multidisciplinary approach. The key issues that we want to stimulate debate around are:

Designing out health risks at work;

Focusing research on prevention and control of workplace health hazards; Using an understanding of human factors and their role in helping people manage their own health protection at work;

Targeting enhanced occupational health services to those who need it most;

Embedding occupational hygiene and occupational medicine in mainstream healthcare training and education;

Working with healthcare to develop a whole life strategy for managing occupational health & occupational hygiene exposures.

We see the coming months, with a strategy review being undertaken by HSE, a major government paper on workplace health professions being released and the end of our existing regulatory ties with Europe as the time to really provoke this debate. BOHS is positioned to make a major difference to the workplace health agenda, and as a member, we want you to feel proud to be wwpart of this, as well as enabled to contribute to or even lead this change.

We see the coming months, with a strategy review being undertaken by HSE, a major government paper on workplace health professions being released and the end of our existing regulatory ties with Europe as the time to really provoke this debate.

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