Dr Asha Kasliwal, FSRH President, October Highlights

Moving from the role of Vice President (Standards) to the role of President of FSRH is proving a fantastic opportunity to learn about all aspects of what the Faculty does. I have been very impressed by the sheer amount of work going on by members and staff to support our work as an educational and standards focussed charity.

It is also proving to be a great opportunity to understand more about the concerns and needs of our members - something I believe we are getting far better at - but where we have plenty more to do. One example of responding to your needs is that we piloted a free webinar to explain the newly published FSRH UKMEC recently. We got a fantastic response to this with over 350 of you listening in and asking questions and very good feedback on the quality of the learning experience. As a result of this, we are planning to run a whole series of webinars in 2017 - based around our clinical guidelines and in partnership with our fantastic Clinical Effectiveness Unit based at the Chalmers Centre in Edinburgh. These webinars will be free to FSRH members and the first one will focus on our guidelines on Contraception After Pregnancy which we are hoping to launch very early in 2017. These will cover contraception after childbirth, abortion, miscarriage, ectopic pregnancy and gestational trophoblastic disease/neoplasia and we look forward to working with our partners at RCOG, RCN, RCM and RCGP to disseminate these important guidelines.

I would also like to welcome our new trustees/council members - Drs Judith Aston, Anne Lashford (re-elected), Jayne Kavanagh and Dr Usha Kumar - two of whom are GPs. In addition we have the privilege of welcoming Dr Jane Dickson as our new Vice President, Strategy with Dr Diana Mansour moving into the role of VP, Clinical Quality. This is a very impressive team and I would urge you as member of the Faculty to make use of your representatives on Council to put forward your views and suggestions so that we can truly reflect your experiences 'on the coal face'. I am all too aware of the challenges being faced by SRH services in primary and secondary care and we are doing all we can to reflect this back to policy makers and commissioners via our newly renamed External Affairs and Standards Team. Please do let us know how care is being impacted in your region/country. We can do so much more if we have the evidence.

Finally I would like to welcome all our new members this year and would encourage you to consider getting involved in the Faculty. We always have interesting committee and project work that relies heavily on our member's time and expertise. In particular I would encourage our nurse Diplomate and Associate members to get involved. We need your experience to help ensure we are a truly multi-disciplinary Faculty. See our website for more details or drop one of us a line.
We look forward to hearing from you.