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Last June we had a successful meeting with members of the Royal College of General Practitioners and others, at which we discussed how best Geriatricians, GP’s with special interests and other community staff might work together.

The report was jointly prepared and I am pleased to say that it has been approved by the RCGP Council Executive. I know that in many areas there are difficulties in organising and providing community services for older people but at least we now have a framework to move things forward.

What about other medical specialties?
The desire to move services to the community affects other specialties in a big way, as it does with geriatric medicine. For example, PCT’s are threatening to decommission specialist rheumatology services and diabetologists are not being allowed to follow-up Type II diabetic patients in hospital. This issue was discussed at a recent workshop at the Royal College of Physicians which I attended. It is clear that the work undertaken by our Primary Care SIG has put us ahead of the game as far as community developments are concerned.

Re-licensure and Specialist Recertification
The White Paper is now out with the expectation that legislation will be introduced in the next session of Parliament. The Dermatologists have produced a framework which they think will suit their specialty. We will have to produce a similar framework for geriatrics. Included amongst the dermatology suggestions are: clinic letter audit, difficult case presentations, observation of practice in clinics, clinical skills, as well as an open-book knowledge assessment. Obviously whatever framework we come up with will have to be broadly similar to the other medical specialties and meet the requirements of the GMC.

Human Rights
The year before last I heard a lecture by Prof Peter Townsend in which he suggested that the new human rights legislation might be an opportunity to challenge age discrimination through the courts. This issue has been taken by a Joint House of Commons and House of Lords Select Committee to which we submitted evidence. We have been invited to give oral evidence at the end of March and I will report on this next time.

National Audiology Plan
I attended a meeting at which this new plan for audiology services in England was initiated. I had never previously been to an initiation meeting and it was an interesting experience, not least because we had six table discussions in one room which made it nigh on impossible to hear what was said. The idea was that we should identify what was missing from the report without seeing the draft. Hopefully implementation of the plan will reduce the dreadfully long waiting list for aids.

CME Journal
As mentioned by the Editor, the BGS has decided to make CME Journal its official CPD Journal. Once all the formalities have been signed, all UK members will receive the journal along with Newsletter and Age and Ageing. Could I ask all members to provide feedback to the editorial team both on the quality of the content of the journal and of the multiple choice questions that will go alongside them. It looks as if a knowledge based assessment will form part of specialist recertification. I hope you agree that it is better that the Society take responsibility for this rather than it being left to others.

Hope to see many of you in Brighton.

Peter Crome