East Midlands & Yorkshire

Results of the East Midlands and Yorkshire Region Survey 
   

Many thanks to all who took part in the survey – about a quarter of regional members responded, which is fantastic.  If you’re as keen as that for everything we’ll have a vibrant regional community, networking and exchanging best practice.

Regional Meetings

The vast majority of you are looking for regional meetings and Open Technical Seminars, although networking events and industry site visits were supported by just under half of respondents.  So we’ll focus on the first two items but if opportunities arise for site visits we’ll try and offer them.  Anyone who thinks their workplace is worth a visit and is willing to have fellow hygienists cast a friendly eye over proceedings, let me know!

Regional meetings are traditionally a couple of hours long and run from late afternoon.  Half of respondents favoured a 4.30pm to 5 pm start time with more in favour of a later start than an earlier one.  Surprisingly, nearly half of you are willing to travel up to 50 miles for a regional meeting (I’d better get in some good biscuits!) with just over half willing to travel up to 20 miles.  I’m very pleasantly surprised by this enthusiasm and commitment and it should make well-attended meetings easier to achieve.  The membership is concentrated in five main areas, centred on Leeds, Sheffield, Hull, Derby and Buxton.  It is therefore my intention to try and hold meetings in all of these areas – I can’t guarantee one for each area each year but hopefully we can accommodate everyone over a couple of years or so.  I hope that those of you that don’t quite fit into these areas will still feel able to attend some events and I’m willing to listen to you views at any time.

There was a fairly even split between those expecting to attend regional meetings regularly and those that would attend for specific topics only –I guess if we get the topics right, all of you might attend regularly!  Three-quarters would also be interested in professional-based events so I’ll be in discussion with Faculty and Head Office as to what can be offered in this respect.

Topics

So, onto the most important bit – the topics that people want to see.  There were some common themes and I have listed the most popular below.  As you can see, fortunately, we are already planning some events based on key topics.  Others such as Asbestos and Thermal Environment have already been successfully run in other regions and it may be possible to get these run in our area – I will investigate.  The other topics give me something to work on in my spare moments!  Practical issues and ‘real world’ also came up several times but rather than list them as a separate topic, I would like to try and include a ‘real world’ speaker for all regional meetings where possible.

Our next meeting is likely to be a REACH Update in the early autumn.  About half of the survey respondents said they were likely to attend so I’m hopeful of a decent audience!  If you are interested in attending, please let me know your preferred location by email (eastmidlands.yorkshire@bohs.org) as soon as possible so I can try and find somewhere suited to the majority.

Once again, thank you for your input and I look forward to meeting some of you soon.

Kate Jones, Regional Organiser