Well, there goes another year and we are now in 2025 with only 350 days until Christmas all over again! May I take this opportunity to wish you all the best for 2025.

Retired members conference – 20 March 2025

We are looking forward to the upcoming retired members conference and registration is now open at this link. It will be a hybrid conference on the theme of ‘Feeling Valued Giving Back’ with 65 seats at BMA House and many seats available to follow and participate online. We hope to learn from the experience of running such an event last year to ensure those joining remotely are fully included, able to ask questions and vote at the appropriate times.

I must thank Surjait Singh and Tom Kane as chair and deputy chair of conference for all the work in putting it together and making it happen. They have assembled a group of excellent speakers, including:

– Anna Rowland, GMC assistant director of fitness to practise policy and business transformation, on the GMC’s mentoring toolkit

– Phil Banfield, BMA council chair, Mary McCarthy, BMA president, Bhavin Visavadia, RCSeng council member and Michael Dawson, BMA Doctor support service

– Plus, I will be speaking about physician-assisted dying and will update on your committee’s work plans.

I am acutely aware that not all retired members are comfortable with remote working, so please let us know if you will need help for remotely accessing the conference and ideally give us an idea of what your issues might be. We will do all we can to assist and ensure the information which would be helpful is available to you.

I highly encourage you to consider proposing motions for conference passage of motions is what drives our policy and actions. There is useful advice and guidance about the BMA’s policy making processes and motion writing on the BMA website. You can also see all previous conference resolutions on the BMA policy database.

The public service pensions remedy – McCloud

There continue to be outstanding issues with implementation of the McCloud remedy for those it affects, please do not ignore any communications related to this. You can always contact the BMA pensions department if you need advice.

NHS Emeritus pilot scheme for consultants and SAS doctors

We have still not managed to review the Emeritus Consultant Pilot scheme with NHS England, but will continue attempting to do so. They are counting success with those who return to their previous place of work, which is clearly much easier than supporting work in another area and really does not need such support as that from NHS England. We have been informed of issues causing failure with access to systems remotely, and in particular no support for remote radiology, which clearly requires appropriate display systems. I am becoming less hopeful that this will develop into a successful process but will keep you updated.

Physician assisted dying webinar – 5 February 2025 at 3pm

On 5 February, we will be running an online webinar on the issues around physician assisted dying, in view of the passage of the bill passing the first reading in Westminster and the likely additional but separate legislation in Scotland. Please put this date in your diary and await further details via email. Rest assured; I will update on this the issue at conference too.

Annual representative meeting 2025 – 23-25 June, Liverpool 

Please do consider nominating yourself for a divisional seat at the ARM in Liverpool this coming summer.  More details on this can be found on the  BMA website. If not standing yourself, please do consider supporting other retired members who may be standing in your division and who will need your backing to ensure we have appropriate representation at the ARM. There will also be the opportunity to obtain a seat at the ARM via elections at  the retired members conference in March. Whoever you may choose to vote for, it is important that all retired members vote to ensure that the ARM is representative of our branch of practice.

Get in touch

As ever, we are always pleased to hear from you. Issues with medical associate professionals who are registered with the GMC, or other issues with NHS service failures, may be particularly useful to hear about, as you are now often consumers rather than providers of healthcare. My contact details are below.

Peter Curry is chair of the BMA retired members committee

Email: [email protected]