Chair's Update October 2023

Dear Members,

The BSA September Council meeting took place last month in Leicester, where trustees were joined by group and SIG leads (or their representatives). Thank you to all those who took time out of their work diaries to attend. The meeting provided the opportunity for those new to BSA roles to meet with existing leads and hear all about the work that different groups are involved with, in fact one of the activities over the 2-days was a mapping exercise to capture all of the external engagement BSA representatives are involved with, which currently exceeds 20 working groups/projects.

During the 2-days we also heard from Ned Carter, our lead for Global Outreach, who is working on developing a fantastic new resource on the BSA website as well as Gaby Saunders, our lead for International Relations, who you may have seen has sent out a communication to members last week with a great opportunity to attend the World Congress of Audiology 2024. Discussions from across the 2-day meeting are now being used to further develop the new BSA strategy.

We also met recently with BSHAA who were keen to resume discussions regarding a College of Audiology and intend to arrange for all interested parties to meet to discuss this matter further, we look forward to being involved in those discussions. Many of you will have noticed that BSHAA have recently changed to both their name and logo. We have formerly requested that this be reconsidered as we believe BSHAA’s current name and logo changes are too similar to those of the BSA and therefore present a risk to the individual identity of our respective organisations. We have strongly request that this be reconsidered, and I will continue to keep you updated on this matter.

We are due to meet with representatives from BAA this week to catch up on a number of work streams, which we are very much looking forward to and I would like to take this opportunity to wish them every success in their forthcoming annual conference.

Kind regards

Donna Corrigan

BSA Chair