Dr Holly Paris
Seeking stewardship of the BGS Presidency, to shift the dial for our ageing population.
Our older people face a disrupted healthcare system characterised by workforce challenges, fragmentation, and economic uncertainty. A progressive organisation, we pride ourselves on being a broad church. However, all past BGS Presidents have been trained in the same hospital medical consultant model. A modern older people's workforce is widely skilled and multidisciplinary, with a diversity of ideas and experience. It's time for the BGS leadership to reflect this, whilst bravely resisting the fear of dilution of expertise.
To be fit for a challenging future, I bring you three fresh themes:
WE ALL NEED TO BE MORE GERIATRICS
We need more Geriatricians. We need more people to choose geriatrics. This does not simply apply to our hospitals, but our entire health and social care infrastructure.
Current workforce strategies will not grow new specialist geriatricians and support team members quickly enough. A more radical, systems-thinking approach is called for.
As BGS President, let me lead the charge for the democratisation of geriatric medicine. Working with Health Boards and ICBs, Deaneries, Community, Primary and Social Care Providers and more, let us make geriatric training and practice “core” for all. The BGS is the centre of quality education and can spearhead a frailty-sensitive approach by multidisciplinary teams across all our systems. This will require catalytic clinical leadership from you, our specialist and generalist geriatric medicine clinicians. Similarly, we need help from our members in training, (agnostic of background) to be the architects and influencers of a “geriatrics revolution”.
This is a call to arms.
TAKING A POPULATION MANAGEMENT APPROACH
Whichever system we work in, we all feel overstretched and are firefighting. Continuing to work in the same way is both unsustainable and unrealistic. We need unity of effort: to be more organised, more strategic with our resourcing, working better across organisational boundaries. Our older people don’t need “more access”; they need the right sort of access for the right sort of care, at the right time.
Population Health Management is a powerful fortune-telling tool: it can reveal who needs our care, service use patterns, and can even help predict who will need us next. This knowledge has game-changing potential, but needs clinical leadership to transform “what” into “how”. By targeting our interventions where they will have the greatest impact, we can improve productivity and focus more deliberately on inequalities in provision. Allowing community and primary care teams to prioritise proactive care requires a shift in practice that could benefit all.
As President-Elect, I will bring an emphasis to population-based thinking: a change in direction. To do this to the greatest effect, I will also champion a “BGS bank” of lived experience voices to augment our own.
BGS AS A HUB FOR INNOVATION
Attracting new member interest alongside well-established offers in research, improvement, and policy should be the next natural step for the BGS. Indeed, some members are already involved with innovation e.g. Health Innovation Networks, NHS Clinical Entrepreneur Scheme etc. Let’s leverage space at our conferences for networking and ideas exchange with partners from social care and industry to grow a BGS Innovation Hub.
I’m a GP asking to be the custodian of a Presidential term. Allow me to work with our next President and Officers to bring unity to our whole geriatric clinician workforce across service interfaces, the cracks through which our patients fall. With most care delivered outside of hospital buildings, my deep understanding of this landscape provides a perspective shift.
I’m standing for President-Elect to be the change I want to see.
More about me in my video.