All six speakers gave excellent presentations and stimulated considerable reaction from the audience. Thursday and Friday sessions provided very good CPD, although it was a pity to see the tail off of the audience on Friday afternoon for what was one of the best sessions on Diabetes. Having twice given the last presentation at an annual BGS meeting, I know the sinking feeling of a speaker as he sees his audience dwindling to a handful of die hards!

Good food, wine and wit
In contrast the annual dinner on Thursday night was the best attended for many years. We were entertained by Dr Colmn O’Mahony, a friend and colleague of mine in Merseyside, who delighted the audience with his wit, speaking as he did, on the edifying business of being a venerealogist!

Janice O’Connell retires as Meeting Secretary on a really high note. Her contribution has been outstanding and I am pleased that her bravery in moving the Autumn Meeting from London to Harrogate has paid off so handsomely. Janice will be one of the organisers at the Gateshead Spring Meeting in 2006, so she cannot rest on her laurels just yet.

It was particularly pleasing at the meeting that Prof Graham Mulley should be awarded the Dhole Eddlestone Memorial Prize for his contribution to the literature of geriatric medicine. Graham Mulley contributed greatly to the development of Age and Ageing during his period of editorship, but his contribution is far wider than that. I think he has the unique ability to put the spotlight on previously neglected but essential areas of geriatric medicine. His BMJ articles on everyday aids and appliances have become classic publications and I was recently taken by his history of geriatric medicine, published in the Postgraduate Medical Journal (April 2003). There he outlines heroes and pioneers of geriatrics, of which he is surely one.

Thinking strategically
The next two years will present the Society and myself with considerable challenges. Alex Mair and myself have formulated a strategic plan, which will now be turned into a business plan to achieve its objectives. I am particularly concerned to re-establish the Society’s influence. I am probably not alone in feeling that the geriatrician has been sidelined in recent policy developments. I think we need to be very much more proactive as a Society, formulating issues and involving the press and media to put forward our views. It is not adequate for us simply to react to developments. We must try to influence the agenda and direction of care of older people.

I have been in preliminary discussions with Lynn Trenery from Pointset Public Relations Company based in Oxford and I hope she will help us to raise the profile of the Society. Subject to approval by the UK Management Committee I will be proposing that the Society produces a press release on the need for older people to be included in clinical trials. In my own field of Parkinson’s disease it is not unusual for trials to exclude the over 70’s who form two thirds of the population with Parkinson’s disease. This pattern of exclusion is repeated through other therapeutic areas, and if we can pull together the knowledge and expertise of the Society, I think we will make this a very live issue. I hope through regional groups and the Policy Committee, we can generate issues that we can use to engender public debate on the improvement of care of older people.

Going international
I am particularly keen to develop a more international outlook in geriatric medicine. It was extremely pleasing to see so many British Geriatrics Society members attending the recent EUGMS meeting in Vienna. The BGS is making a bid to host the secretariat of this organisation within Marjory Warren House. If this is achieved, it will not only develop a further income stream for the Society, it will put us at the heart of developments in geriatric medicine in Europe. It is reckoned that there are 15,000 specialists in geriatric medicine in Europe and we need to play a full part in this international forum.

Immediately after the Friday of the British Geriatrics Society meeting, I had to get up at 5.00 a.m. on the succeeding Saturday to fly to Kuala Lumpar to examine in the PACES exam for the Royal College of Physicians. I was delighted to find that one of the organising lecturers was a geriatrician, Dr Sharul Kamarulzaman, who trained in Cardiff and spent eleven years in total in the UK, working with Tony James at Bridgend to gain her initial geriatric experience. She is now lecturer in the University of Malaysia and is developing with Philip Poi, a geriatric unit within the University of Malaysia Medical Centre in Kuala Lumpar. I spent a very interesting afternoon visiting the unit and also the specialist Parkinson’s clinic. They have a high morale and a well developed multidisciplinary team working the spectrum of from acute (two patients were being ventilated on the geriatric unit!), to an excellent rehabilitation facility. Dr Sharul is intending to come back to do an MD on Falls in the UK and I am sure she is going to be a leader in academic geriatrics in South East Asia in the future.

In the following two weeks I had an extremely busy programme, chairing and speaking at an excellent Parkinson’s meeting in Coventry on 18th October and subsequently going on to attend the Harverian Dinner at the Royal College of Physicians in London. It was good to see a number of geriatricians at this august occasion, including Linda Pattison, Jacky Morris, Chandi Vellodi (great to see her back on top form) and Mary Piper (now a leading clinician in the prison service). I think there is every indication that geriatric medicine is now playing a full part within the Colleges and it is particularly pleasing that there will be a special question group for Part I on geriatric medicine, to make our contribution to the early training in general medicine more explicit.

On the 26th October I took part in an excellent symposium at the Royal Society of Medicine, run by their geriatrics and gerontological committee, organised by Jackie Morris. This meeting explored the management of chronic illness across a broad spectrum from primary care, geriatric medicine right through to examination of the new American models. It was particularly interesting to hear Dr Jeannie Pritchett, the Medical Director of United Health Europe, responsible for the Evercare Project. She is a true geriatrician and I felt her presentation was a great challenge. It was notable that Chris Foote, the originator of the Epics Project and pioneer in integrating elderly care was in the audience. Rather like penicillin, original ideas are started in the UK but being developed in America and re-exported to us. The Department of Health should take note; they would have saved an awful lot in airfares if they had supported and exploited the talent and innovations right on their own doorstep!

Nursing Consultants
On the 28th October I was privileged to be asked to speak as a keynote speaker to the consultant nurses in elderly care group, at the Department of Health, led by Deborah Sturdy. It is clear that we have a lot in common with the nursing consultants and they are keen to be a part of our Society, and also to work jointly with us towards improving elderly care. I hope we will be able to develop this relationship and with other specialties allied to medicine over the next two years. The day was capped by meeting Ray Tallis at the Athenaeum Club in Pall Mall. He now divides his time between his flourishing philosophical career and his duties at Manchester University and St George’s in academic geriatric medicine. I highly recommend his book Hippocratic Oaths. It will strike a chord with many geriatricians; he articulates many of our feelings and is very positive about our specialty at the end of the book.

Best wishes to Bob Stout on his retirement of the Presidency. With Cameron he has guided the BGS through major change in its now devolved structure. The integrity of the Society has been well served by those representing the different nations within the UK - Dr Joe McElroy from Northern Ireland, Dr Donald Farquhar from Scotland, Dr Ed Wilkins from Wales and Dr David Black from the England Council. Joe and Donald are stepping down from the Committee and I would like to thank them for all of their efforts.

We are always anxious to get members’ views on any issue affecting our specialty and to facilitate this I will be starting a discussion forum on the Society web site, but I would also urge you to write for the newsletter. Kevin tells me that he has only received three letters in his time as Editor. Surely we can do better than this!

Jerry Playfer